<p>To the Editor:<br /><br />
Philip Roth's essay [&ldquo;Writing American Fiction,&rdquo; March] forced me to recall another by Philip Rahv, written some twenty years ago. Rahv suggested that [unlike the American novelist] the European writer . . . has always been confronted by more experience than he could reasonably hope to handle, experience so contradictory and circumstantial that he despaired to find some order in it, much less some moral significance. Now Roth's description of the Grimes case makes the same claims for American reality and for the American writer: that there is experience aplenty to write about, but also that most of it can only anger the moral sense and frustrate the imagination. I think not. The moral of the Grimes affair, it seems to me, is that, yes, American life is stupefying and infuriating, no cause for optimism, &ldquo;bouncy&rdquo; or otherwise. But . . . Mr. Roth only makes it clear that at such a time, it takes someone of surpassing sanity and intelligence and detachment to hold out for the brute fact that two girls are dead while the lunatic circus of publicity capers around that fact to our endless distraction and even, God help us, to our amusement. . . .</p>
<p>After such knowledge as the Grimes case offers to the creative imagination, it becomes clear that the writer who dares to handle this much of American experience will have to have not only Ralph Ellison's wariness and distrust, but his capacity for high comedy&mdash;for that mode of comic insight (one finds it occasionally in Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Nathanael West as well) which allows for the appalling paradoxes of American life but does not forgive them or those who create them. . . .</p>
<p>But whatever manner the American novelist chooses, it seems to me that he is now more than ever obliged to assume the task his European colleagues have been more regularly attempting&mdash;that of recovering in his fiction the sense of at least a rudimentary standard of judgment and morality against which his own national experience may be tested. . . . The events surrounding a murder in 20th-century Chicago are no easier or harder to dramatize than those which surround a murder in 19th-century St. Petersburg.</p>
<p align="right"><strong>Herbert R. Haber</strong><br />
<em>Clark University<br />
Worcester, Mass.</em></p>
<p align="center">_____________</p><br />
<p>To the Editor:<br /><br />
Philip Roth seems to have lost track of the very title of the article he submitted: &ldquo;Writing American <em>Fiction</em>&rdquo; (emphasis mine). . . .</p>
<p>Mr. Roth would do well to read Vladimir Nabokov's concept of fiction . . . that the <em>good</em> writer creates his own world&mdash;a world which has and must have validity in its own terms. That this fictional world may involve realistic characters in circumstances which the reader can equate with the &ldquo;real world&rdquo; does not at all invalidate the concept. I for one am content to let newspapers and works of non-fiction . . . do the reporting for the everyday world.</p>
<p align="right"><strong>Carol Lipis</strong><br />
<em>New York City</em></p>
<p align="center">_____________</p><br />
<p>To the Editor:<br /><br />
Has Mr. Roth never heard of the simple affirmation of life, the sheer joy of mere existence expressed by most poets&mdash;certainly, I think, by Mr. Bellow in the scene where Henderson, in the arctic, runs around the plane with the boy in his arms? . . . It may, of course, be true that with an extraordinarily gifted writer like Mr. Bellow one is made to feel this affirmation with great intensity, whereas the less skillful practitioner degenerates into mawkishness. . . .</p>
<p align="right"><strong>Constance H. Poster</strong><br />
<em>New York City</em></p>
<p align="center">_____________</p><br />
<p>To the Editor:<br /><br />
By now it is almost a critical axiom that when one writer comments on the work of another, generally more is revealed about the fictional concerns of the commentator than of the subject. That Philip Roth proves to be no exception on this score cannot be held against him. . . . Yet surely much of his comment about the writers he discusses is based on the notion that they are not writing the kind of books he thinks they should be writing. If American reality is as meaningless and crooked and unreal as <em>I</em> think it is, he seems to be saying, how can any writer be pleased with it?</p>
<p>This kind of attitude is, critically, as sterile as it is unfair. As an instance, it can lead Roth to say of a writer like Malamud, largely because he is not preoccupied with specific sociological detail, with the furnishings of time, place, and class, as Roth himself is, that Malamud's work represents but another instance of the writer's withdrawal from American reality. Yet what does this come down to, since Roth concedes Malamud has not &ldquo;spurned life or an examination of the difficulties of being human&rdquo;? If such examination is and should be the central concern of literature, then the source of Roth's complaint must be that it is the <em>manner</em> of the examination which Roth finds unsatisfactory. That is his privilege, but it is both arbitrary and a little wrong-headed. Fiction as metaphor has a powerful tradition in American literature, and often represents, rather than a withdrawal from, an engagement with reality in a more profound way. One wonders how Roth, were he a contemporary, would have regarded Hawthorne's work, or even Melville's. Certainly it does not seem likely he would have considered them to embody the genius whose absence he deplores in our own time.</p>
<p>This is perhaps at the heart of what I find more disturbing about Roth's remarks (and about those of a good many other commentators on contemporary American life) than his criticism of any particular writer; a parochialism, an absense of perspective, both psychological and historical, so extensive that Roth can only speak of American life as though there has been no humanity before, and no prior society. His recoil is bound to be excessive.</p>
<p>As a writer I hold no particular brief for present-day American life. . . . When Roth speaks of how Edmund Wilson, after reading <em>Life</em> magazine, feels he does not belong to the country depicted there, like Roth, I know what Wilson means. But I must confess to feeling exactly the same way on reading the story with which Roth opens his article. What I am getting at is that Roth, like <em>Life</em> magazine, has begun to deal in public images&mdash;not with reality, but with public and surface aspects of American or any other life, expanded and exaggerated&mdash;and has passed them off as a substitute for life as the normal citizen knows and experiences it in the privacy of his own blood and soul. . . . This is all right for <em>Life</em>, but dangerous for writers.</p>
<p align="right"><strong>Eugene Ziller</strong><br />
<em>Brooklyn, New York</em></p>
<p align="center">_____________</p><br />
<p>To the Editor:<br /><br />
Philip Roth complains that it grows harder every day to write fiction in America because the things that happen down the block are often, even as facts, almost inconceivable. I find his argument curiously naive. . . . Indeed, Mr. Roth belies himself at the outset, because he begins his lament by telling us an incredible story, and proves that it is possible to get it across. . . .</p>
<p>It is astonishing to me that a serious artist can say, as Mr. Roth does, that fiction is <em>becoming</em> impossible. Fiction has always been impossible. This is the challenge to the artist. His achievement is put against the scale of the impossible. I rather think that it is not the art of fiction which is in trouble, but only certain kinds of fiction. . . . I am surprised that he does not mention Wright Morris, who has given us <em>four</em> novels within the decade, each of which, I think, fulfills admirably the conditions of making our reality credible. . . .</p>
<p>Mr. Roth concludes by expressing annoyance and worry over a recent phenomenon he calls affirmation, typified by a bouncy style, a yea-saying he thinks has no right, given the present historical situation, to be. He finds it self-absorbed, false in tone, hollow, and unjustified by current events. This is shallow criticism. The truth is that there is a steady, deep, and powerful stream in American literature, exemplified by works celebrating the self and the remaking of the self in joy and elation, even euphoria; this stream is as integral to our reality as the &ldquo;No, In Thunder!&rdquo; Its joyousness and laughter flow perhaps from the spring of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, through Frost and Henry Miller . . . and now crop up in Gold and Bellow. . . .</p>
<p>In short, I think Mr. Roth has turned the matter inside out. If one must face reality, it is just as true, as Emerson would have put it, that reality must face the self. . . .</p>
<p align="right"><strong>Jascha Kessler</strong><br />
<em>Hamilton College<br />
Clinton, New York</em></p>
<p align="center">_____________</p><br />
<p>To the Editor:<br /><br />
Why does Philip Roth . . . ignore the best work of the authors he discusses to cavil at their lesser works? Why, for example, does he wholly ignore Herbert Gold's best book, <em>The Man Who Was Not With It?</em> Or Norman Mailer's <em>The Naked and the Dead, Deer Park</em>, and <em>Barbary Shore? . . .</em>. Why does he fail to mention Saul Bellow's <em>The Victim</em> and limit his comment on <em>Augie March</em> to some condescending notes on style (never alluding to the content) while he discusses <em>Henderson, the Rain King</em> at length? . . .</p>
<p>Isn't the answer simply that Mr. Roth's whole point is untenable when applied to the best of America's recent novels? Rather than voluntarily withdrawing interest from the social and political phenomena of our time&mdash;as Mr. Roth claims&mdash;our best contemporary writers have expressed, frequently in a kind of metaphor, the deepest terror and longings of our age. . . .</p>
<p>Though one would little suspect it from Roth's apparent preoccupation with the &ldquo;grander political and social phenomena of our time,&rdquo; his own fiction is much more limited, seeming to revolve only upon the axis of American Jewishness, good or bad, faith or fraud. . . . All too often, Mr. Roth sacrifies &ldquo;moral responsibility&rdquo; for an exploitation of moral ambiguities: a sacrifice of humanity for irony. . . .</p>
<p align="right"><strong>Gerald Schoenfeld</strong><br />
<em>New York City</em></p>
<p align="center">_____________</p><br />
<p>To the Editor:<br /><br />
Of Philip Roth one can only say, &ldquo;Listen to him! He's discovering America!&rdquo;</p>
<p>Yes, it's all true, what he says about our time and our community. He discovers the world&mdash;almost as if, seeing an apple fall in Newark, he discovers the law of gravitation.</p>
<p>Where has he been all these millennia? Hasn't he heard about Sodom and Gomorrah, or listened to Isaiah and Jeremiah? Where was he during the dreadful days in the house of Agamemnon? Doesn't he know what life was really like in the Golden Age of Pericles or under the brilliant cloak of the Renaissance?</p>
<p>He suffers from the innocence of historical illiteracy. There is only <em>now</em>; history has no meaning and time does not exist.</p>
<p>But the essence of fiction is development, unfolding, change in the realm of time. Fictional characters (like real ones) can be understood only if their uniqueness is combined with a measure of universality. And by the relativity that underlies aesthetic, as well as physical, phenomena, this universality is located not only in space, but also in time&mdash;in the past of the characters, of the writer and the reader, in the past of the world. . . .</p>
<p>If Roth finds no reasons for affirmation, and perhaps no subject as a writer, it may be because he confuses the community with the world, just as he confuses now with eternity, and himself with Columbus.</p>
<p align="right"><strong>Joseph Mindel</strong><br />
<em>Larchmont, New York</em></p>
<p align="center">_____________</p><br />
<p><strong>Mr. Roth</strong> writes:<br /><br />
I cannot argue with the good sense Mr. Haber makes as to what the task is for the contemporary American writer, <em>given</em> the contemporary American experience. That I, as a writer, should say&mdash;to use Mr. Haber's phrase&mdash;that much of the experience &ldquo;can only anger the moral sense and frustrate the imagination,&rdquo; and that Mr. Haber, as a literary critic, should remind me that at such times one must have &ldquo;surpassing sanity and intelligence and detachment&rdquo; is as it should be. I did not intend, finally, to claim that the events surrounding a murder in 20th-century Chicago are harder to dramatize than those which surrounded a murder in 19th-century St. Petersburg. Our task is no <em>more</em> arduous than Dostoevsky's; but again, as Mr. Haber points out, it is no less arduous: the purpose of my essay was to make some suggestions as to how and why it is arduous today, and particularly so for the writer whose concerns are social and whose talent and instinct lead him to write in the mode of realism.</p>
<p>Though I have not &ldquo;read&rdquo; Vladimir Nabokov's &ldquo;concept of fiction&rdquo; and cannot vouch for the accuracy of Miss Lipis's phrasing of it, I am nevertheless quite familiar with the cliché that says that &ldquo;the <em>good</em> writer creates his own world&rdquo;&mdash;though I suspect Miss Lipis, slightly, of sneaking that emphatic <em>good</em> in there just to burn me up. Aristotle said: &ldquo;The epic, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, most music on the flute and on the lyre&mdash;all these are, in principle, imitations.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Are we evened-up now on authorities? I do not see that the information Miss Lipis bears has anything to do with the subject of my essay.</p>
<p>As for Miss Poster. What kind of question is, &ldquo;Has Mr. Roth never heard of the simple affirmation of life, the sheer joy of mere existence expressed by most poets. . .?&rdquo; I love joy, especially sheer joy. My point as regards <em>Henderson</em>, however, is that the joy Bellow finds there he does not find in the world of Asa Leventhal or Tommy Wilhelm or even Augie March, but in an Africa that makes no claim whatsoever to being <em>real</em>. That's all.</p>
<p>In reply to Mr. Ziller:</p>
<ol>
<li>My point was not that certain writers are not writing the kind of books I think they <em>should</em> be writing, but that, simply, they are writing the kind they <em>are</em> writing. I do not believe there was anything in my essay to indicate that I had &ldquo;a complaint&rdquo; against Malamud. My concluding remark about Malamud was, in fact, just this: &ldquo;. . . that he does not&mdash;or has not yet&mdash;found the contemporary scene a proper or sufficient backdrop for his tales of heartlessness and heartache, of suffering and regeneration.&rdquo; It is the backdrop that I spoke of as insufficient, not the writer. Furthermore, I was not asking Malamud or any other writer to share whatever concern for &ldquo;time, place, and class&rdquo; I may have displayed in certain stories of my own. Rather I intended to examine the relationship between our experience and our art, and perhaps to come up with some reasons to explain the discomfort so many contemporary writers feel&mdash;myself included&mdash;with realism, and with satire too, where one sometimes winds up doing less than one intended. My discussion of Malamud, my words about Bellow's <em>Henderson</em>, had primarily to do with the examination I undertook in the essay of &ldquo;certain literary signs, certain obsessions and innovations and concerns, to be found in the novels of our best writers, supporting the notion that the world we have been given, the society and the community, has ceased to be as suitable or as manageable a subject for the novelist as it once may have been.&rdquo; I was not disapproving of what Mr. Ziller refers to as the &ldquo;powerful tradition&rdquo; of &ldquo;fiction as metaphor.&rdquo; I was, first, seeking out its most recent manifestations, and second, evaluating certain of these works as I saw fit. As for Melville and Hawthorne, if I had been a contemporary, I would probably not have been so holy about them then as Mr. Ziller chooses to be now.</li>
<li>I did not &ldquo;deplore&rdquo; the absence of genius in our times. Instead I noted that my claim that American writers had suffered a loss of subject might well be &ldquo;an attempt [by me] to place most of the responsibility outside the writer for what may finally be nothing more than the absence of genius in our times. . . .&rdquo; I was then, in all seriousness, calling the thesis of my essay into question. It is not humble, I know, to draw attention to one's own humility. It is what one is reduced to, however, when one is made out to be an ass.</li>
<li>I do not see that the &ldquo;public aspects&rdquo; of American life are any less &ldquo;real&rdquo;&mdash;having to do with reality&mdash;than the private aspects. They only <em>strike</em> one, as my recounting of the Grimes girls' story struck Mr. Ziller, as &ldquo;expanded and exaggerated.&rdquo; The life that Mr. Ziller's &ldquo;normal citizen&rdquo; experiences &ldquo;in the privacy of his own blood and soul&rdquo; is, after all, what goes on outside himself. Is the implication here that the &ldquo;normal citizen&rdquo; sees only &ldquo;normal&rdquo; events, &ldquo;normal&rdquo; people, has only &ldquo;normal&rdquo; feelings? Or that there are separate categories of life, public and private? I am not convinced that the horror that went on in Chicago&mdash;the murder of the Grimes girls, the murder of decorum and feeling&mdash;is any less important to me, ultimately, than my own marriage or my slipped disc.</li>
</ol>
<p>I shall make an effort to forgive Mr. Kessler his rhetoric&mdash;&ldquo;Fiction has always been impossible. This is the challenge to the artist&rdquo;&mdash;if he will go easy on my naivety. I do not know if I want to forgive him what I think to be a certain misrepresentation of what I happened to have said. I did not write that &ldquo;yea-saying . . . has no right, given the present historical situation.&rdquo; I said that certain affirmative responses, such as Styron's in <em>Set This House on Fire</em> and Bellow's in <em>Henderson</em>, interested me in that in the one the self was celebrated as it was &ldquo;excluded from society&rdquo; and in the other &ldquo;as it was exercised and admired in a fantastic one.&rdquo; I contrasted Eugene Henderson and Cass Kinsolving with the hero of Ralph Ellison's <em>Invisible Man</em>, who, when forced into a position in which he is isolated from the culture and the community, does not see any particular reason for joy or celebration or contentment. I also said that certain euphoric writings (in particular I discussed some of the work of Herbert Gold) did not convince me of either their joy or their elation; elation seemed to me here not to be a response but an attitude&mdash;a pose. That there is &ldquo;a deep and powerful stream in American literature . . . celebrating the self [and] integral to our reality&rdquo; seems to me no real criticism of my essay, which set out, as I have already said, to trace this tradition <em>into</em> the present, and to present some hypothesis to help explain its appearance in our fiction now. That I happen to have reservations about certain of these works cannot be dismissed by pointing to the great names of the past. I know about Whitman too, and about Thoreau, but the work of neither seems to me to justify for a moment the willful and mannered euphoria that I think of as a limitation in the work of Herbert Gold. The existence of Robert Frost, Henry Miller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, makes <em>Henderson, the Rain King</em> nothing more or less than what it is.</p>
<p>I do not believe I can convince Mr. Schoenfeld of anything, and won't try.</p>
<p>My dear Mr. Mindel:<br /><br />
Okay&mdash;where were <em>you</em> during the dreadful days in the house of Agamemnon? Let's stand up and be counted.</p>
<p align="center">_____________</p><br />
</body>

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