{"id":704,"date":"2017-01-27T02:20:41","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T02:20:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/?p=704"},"modified":"2017-01-30T19:44:56","modified_gmt":"2017-01-30T19:44:56","slug":"mr-roth-mr-melville-mr-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/2017\/01\/mr-roth-mr-melville-mr-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Mr. Roth, Mr. Melville & Mr. Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

We hadn\u2019t thought about Philip Roth in some years, so it was with some delight, and a few misgivings, that we ran into him recently in the pages of The New Yorker <\/em>(Jan. 30 issue).\u00a0Actually it was just a Philip Roth e-mail, or portions of e-mails, extracted for a Talk of the Town \u201ccasual”<\/a> by Judith Thurman.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Thurman had sent a note to the 83-year-old Roth because she wanted to pick his brains on the only subject anyone wants to talk about these days, Our New President. Some years back Roth wrote a darkly satirical fantasy, The Plot Against America<\/em>, in which Charles Lindbergh gets into the White House and commences a pro-Nazi\u00a0regime, complete with Nuremberg-style laws restricting the Jews. (The whole concept sounds like a lurid exercise in Jewish paranoia, but Roth mostly got around that by telling it as faux-autobiography, thereby making such paranoia the implicit theme of the book.) <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"The big\u00a0question the interviewer posed here was, approximately: Do you see a parallel here between the fictional President Lindbergh and Donald Trump, who seemed to echo Lindbergh with his calls for “America First” in his Inaugural address?<\/span><\/p>\n

Roth\u2019s answer was scathing on the subject of Trump. He said he much preferred Lindbergh, who\u2014quoting Roth\u2019s reply here\u2014\u201cdespite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed great physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance . . . Trump is just a con artist. The relevant book about Trump\u2019s American forebear is Herman Melville\u2019s ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel\u2014Melville\u2019s last\u2014that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There is so much shallow glibness in this reply that it\u2019s probably easiest to begin by pointing out a couple of factual errors. Like a bumptious, conceited grad student, Roth cites an obscure Melville novel and suggests it\u2019s a prophetic allegory about Donald Trump. The problem here is, Roth almost certainly never read The Confidence-Man<\/em>\u00a0past its title. Because it is actually not the tale of a flim-flam artist who seduces a gullible public, as Roth apparently imagines. It\u2019s an experimental, absurdist, rather self-indulgent exercise, with only a scant semblance of a plot. Set on a Mississippi steamboat, it describes a vast array of passengers, depicting a cross-section of American \u201ctypes\u201d of the 1850s. Some of them are snake-oil salesmen or charity-hucksters, others are eager investors looking looking for get-rich-quick schemes. Moving among them is a nameless character who changes his disguise from chapter to chapter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The full title of the novel is The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade<\/em>, and the title character\u2019s shape-shifting is the real point of the story, inasmuch as it has one. Whatever else one thinks of Donald Trump, he is the diametrical opposite of a mysterious shape-shifter. One of the oddest and most striking things about Trump, in fact, is how little his persona\u00a0has changed in forty years of public life. You have to figure\u00a0Roth just found the name, “The Confidence-Man” too good to resist. If it wasn\u2019t a book about a Trump-like character, then it should<\/em> be. Few people would be the wiser.<\/span><\/p>\n

Roth\u2019s other blunder\u00a0was calling the book Melville\u2019s last novel, which is not quite true, unless you leave out the far better known and posthumously published Billy Budd<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Roth\u2019s snooty, false erudition in the field of American literature is much of a piece with his cartoony ideas about President Trump. He levels at Trump every tiresome insult, every dismissive characterization that Washington Post columnists and cable-news commentators have been reciting since Trump first entered the political arena. As in his comparison of Trump with Lindbergh, Roth tries hard to appear fair and judicious by mentioning other Republican Presidents he didn\u2019t like but weren\u2019t nearly as bad as Trump:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He follows this with a dire warning that the Trump Administration may lead to \u201ca genuine assault upon [writers\u2019] rights\u201d in \u201ca country drowning in Trump\u2019s river of lies.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Roth\u2019s philippic against President Trump has nothing new or insightful in it. It would read like the ravings of a senile madman if we hadn\u2019t already seen this sort of thing, time after time, in a hundred other places. What\u2019s noteworthy here is that Roth is a not a political columnist, or someone with unique insight into Donald Trump, yet he’s eager to recite\u00a0the main talking-points of the extreme anti-Trump factions, as well as\u00a0embellish them with whatever random insults come to mind. Trump is ignorant; he knows no art or history or philosophy; he is indecent, threatens freedom of speech, and lies unceasingly<\/em>. In all likelihood\u00a0no one\u2019s ever quizzed Mr. Trump\u00a0on his knowledge of art or history or philosophy. These are just rote denunciations, decoupled from any need for factual basis, and considered beyond challenge. Mere\u00a0ritualistic signaling\u00a0that one belongs to Anti-Trump Party .\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a paradox here. In his long literary career (c. 1959-2009) Roth’s persona was that of a cranky controversialist who wouldn’t\u00a0follow the herd and never feared to offend. At the start of his career, his closely observed stories of middle-class Jews were thought to be too revealing, bad PR for the Jewish people. Effectively \u201canti-Semitic,\u201d in fact: an accusation that dogged Roth for decades.\u00a0His most successful novel, Portnoy\u2019s Complaint<\/em> (1969), set the bar for bestselling raunch, combining an\u00a0obscene sex satire with\u00a0a\u00a0manic,\u00a0breathless, interminable\u00a0parody of\u00a0a Jewish stand-up-comic act.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Jews in The Plot Against America<\/em> (2004) are transgressive in yet another way. Based on his family and neighbors in Newark, New Jersey, c. 1940, they\u00a0are flawed, weak, full of denial, hoping to find a way to accommodate themselves to the new Nazi-sympathizing government of President Lindbergh. There’s even a Conservative rabbi who attaches himself to the Lindbergh regime, cajoling\u00a0his fellow\u00a0Jews to put their fears at ease. In his\u00a0e-mails to the New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s Thurman, Roth explained that he didn’t\u00a0conceive the book as a \u201cwarning,\u201d rather he was just\u00a0trying to imagine realistically how his family and those around him might have behaved in such a situation. \u201cI wanted to imagine how we would have fared, which meant I had first to invent an ominous American government that threatened us.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As it happens, the\u00a0invented political history is mostly claptrap, full of unlikely plot twists that scarcely work even within the context of a fantasy. Charles Lindbergh might conceivably have become a GOP nominee and even President someday, but not in 1940. (He didn’t even enter the public arena as spokesman for the America First Committee until\u00a01941.) Moreover, even Roth could see that the notion of\u00a0Lindbergh as a full-on Nazi-sympathizer was a bit much. Accordingly the author\u00a0 “lampshaded” his way out of that problem by offering\u00a0the harebrained\u00a0explanation that Lindbergh was being blackmailed all along. The Nazis\u00a0had kidnapped his infant son, it seems, and they were holding the boy hostage in order to force Lucky Lindy to implement a Final Solution in America.<\/span><\/p>\n

Historical-political imagination is not Roth\u2019s long suit. This comes out clearly at the end of the e-mail interview, when Thurman asks him \u201chow Trump threatens us.\u201d Having given that\u00a0rich\u00a0litany of anti-Trump clich\u00e9s\u00a0earlier, Roth now comes up almost blank. He\u00a0offers\u00a0the feeblest, most shopworn worry in the book: \u201cWhat is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe.”<\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We hadn\u2019t thought about Philip Roth in some years, so it was with some delight, and a few misgivings, that we ran into him recently in the pages of The New Yorker (Jan. 30 issue).\u00a0Actually it was just a Philip Roth e-mail, or portions of e-mails, extracted for a Talk of the Town \u201ccasual” by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[40,12,43,37,36,42,41,38,39],"class_list":["post-704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cocoa-marsh","tag-charles-lindbergh","tag-donald-trump","tag-jews","tag-judith-thurman","tag-philip-roth","tag-portnoys-complaint","tag-the-confidence-man","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-the-plot-against-america"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6KTdR-bm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=704"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":717,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions\/717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}