David Herman
Bellow, Roth and Malamud

David Herman | Bellow, Roth and Malamud | 02.21.24

- Hello, it’s David Herman again. Welcome, lovely to see you all. This evening I’m going to be talking about, arguably the three greatest Jewish-American writers of the second half of the 20th Century. Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. During the 50s and 70s, between, in those 20, 25 years, those three really transformed the Jewish-American novel and with that, the American novel itself. Saul Bellow famously called the three of them, himself, Roth and Malamud, the Hart Schaffner and Marx of literature after a famous American upmarket menswear manufacturer. The three were part of what some call the new Jewish visibility, a similar project of adapting Yiddishkeit to modernism and it’s an interesting mix in the work of all three of them between a certain kind of Jewishness and a certain kind of modernism. First, there were three. Then later it was really just Bellow and Roth fighting it out to be the great modern American writer. Who was the greatest of them all? Why did they have such an impact?

When Bernard Malamud died in 1986, his great friends and contemporaries, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were quick to pay tribute. Malamud, wrote Roth, wrote of a meagre world of pain in a language all his own. Roth spoke warmly of what he called the locutions, inversions and diction of Jewish immigrant speech, a heap of broken verbal bones. That’s a wonderful phrase, “A heap of broken verbal bones.” That looked, until he came along in those early stories to make them dance to his sad tune to be no longer of use to anyone other than the Borsch belt comic and the professional nostalgia among. Malamud, Bellow wrote, in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York. He was, Bellow went on, a writer of exquisite parables. Born in Brooklyn in 1914, Malamud was the son of a Russian immigrant grocer, Max and his wife Bertha. He was part of that extraordinary generation of Jewish-American writers born either side of the First World War. Delmore Schwartz in 1913, Malamud in 1914, Bellow and Arthur Miller in 1915, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer just after the war.

It was a hard childhood, Malamud’s father was ground down by poverty. When Malamud was still in his teens, his mother died in a mental hospital after years of suffering from schizophrenia. His brother Eugene later spent much of his adult life in and out of institutions. Malamud struggled to find his way as a writer and then suddenly, barely 30, his life changed in just a few years. In 1945, he married. In 1949, he got a job teaching English composition in Oregon in the northwest of the United States, on the other side of America. He had written to 200 colleges, only two of them offered him a job. The move transformed him. The 1950s were hugely productive years for Malamud. In 1952, he wrote “The Natural”, a novel about a baseball player, later filmed with Robert Redford. Then came his masterpiece, “The Assistant” in 1957. It’s a dark story of loyalty and betrayal in a grocer store in Brooklyn, a world familiar to Malamud from his childhood. It’s the moving story of a struggling Jewish grocer, Morris Bober who is robbed by a young Italian whom he then unknowingly takes on as his assistant.

What is striking about the novel looking back today is how it’s part of a particular moment in 1950s America, American culture. Where writers were interested in working class and lower middle class characters, often Jewish or Italian immigrants. A grocer like Morris Bober, Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty” which first appeared as a TV drama in 1953 and then as a film in 1955. About an Italian-American butcher living in the Bronx, played by Rod Steiger in the original TV production and then by Ernest Borgnine in the film. Then you get Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, a humble salesman in “Death of a Salesman” in 49 and Eddie Carbone, an Italian American longshoreman in Miller’s, “A View from the Bridge” in 55 who lives near Brooklyn Bridge. Malamud’s “The Assistant” caught this particular moment in American 1950s culture which continued really with the “The Pawnbroker” in 1964 and perhaps that was the last great hurrah of that genre. And this is so true of Malamud’s writing.

You have shopkeepers and grocers in “The Assistant”. You have Feld the shoemaker and his helper Sobel in “The First Years”, Max, a peddler’s son. Kessler, formerly an egg candler and Ignace the janitor in “The Mourners”. Rosan, the ex-coffee salesman in “Take Pity”. George and his sister in “A Summer’s Reading”. Willy Schlegel, the janitor and Mister Panessa, the grocer in “The Bill”. Lieb, the baker, in “The Loan”. Salzman the matchmaker in one of his greatest stories, “The Magic Barrel”. The next year appeared his best book of short stories, “The Magic Barrel”, in 1958. Like Bellow and Roth, Malamud was both a great novelist and a great short story writer. In 1961, Malamud and his family moved back east. He continued to be enormously productive. Six more novels and numerous short stories, perhaps his most successful novel in this later phase was “The Fixer” in 1966 which recreates the story of Mendel Beilis, a Russian Jew who finds himself accused of ritual murder. It was awarded both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize and was filmed two years later.

Those are the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, the two most prestigious awards you can get in America for fiction. “‘Do you consider yourself a real Jew?’, "Frank the Italian grocery store assistant asked Morris.” This is one of the questions at the heart of Malamud’s work, what makes an authentic Jew? Many of Malamud’s most interesting characters, especially in his early work are tormented by this question. There is often something weak, unmoored, even anxious about his younger characters. In contrast with something strange yet more authentic about the older Jews, almost invariably male. Malamud said that he wrote simple stories about simple people. Grocers in “The Assistant”, Yakoff Bock, a handyman in “The Fixer”. These were very different characters from Bellow’s Herzog from Roth’s Portnoy or Zuckerman. Writers and intellectuals, suffering jokers. But those his novels may seem simple they were far from it. In his fascinating biography of Malamud, Philip Davis quotes a revealing line from Malamud. “I’ve often thought of giving a course "in the human sentence.” Malamud was an absolute craftsman.

Fascinated by working and working on a word, a phrase, a sentence till he got it right. Davis shows how Malamud worked and reworked his manuscripts, always shortening and tightening the sentences till he was happy with them. He was a perfectionist. The result was a distinctive style. Spare, lean prose, very different from Bellow’s verbal torrents or Roth’s pyrotechnics. Writing some years later in the New York review of books, the critic Edward Mendelson wrote, “Malamud wrote in sculpted sentences, "compressing Yiddish diction into a demotic, "modernist prose poetry.” Broken in something, broke what breaks. The Rabbi’s trousers were a week from ragged. Don’t you understand what it means human? His paragraphs moved with concentrated efficiency towards unexpected endings wrote Mendelson. Malamud was a craftsman, dedicated to his writing, a great writer, creating moving stories which seem simple but were just so much more. He was a workaholic, Roth always joked that when he got up and Roth was also a workaholic and he used to get up very early in the morning but he pointed out that whatever time he got up, Malamud had already been at his desk for two hours.

The main themes and images in Malamud, well solitude, aloneness, Kessler in “The Mourners”, Malamud describes him. He was much alone as he had been in most of his life, the characters in “The Assistant” likewise. Then there’s question of the relations between Christianity, Judaism and conversion. In the introduction to an edition of “The Assistant”, the editor writes, “The Assistant” is all about conversion. Alpine, an Italian-American orphan becomes a Jew right at the end of the novel. “Being Jewish is a grim and dyspeptic business,” writes Rosand, full of guilt and longing. “The Assistant” he goes on, “is also Malamud’s dialogue with Christian culture. "Perhaps his quarrel with Christianity "for Malamud makes his outsider, Morris, "with his broken English and Russian boyhood, "and anti-Semitic neighbours and meagre poverty "and an infuriating morality the ultimate insider. "He makes him Jesus Christ, I suffer for you. "Jews in Malamud’s world are the true Christians.” Rosen writes.

But the question haunting the novel is whether Malamud is restoring to Judaism something appropriated by Christian culture. Then thirdly, there are these dreams of a better life which run through his fiction. In “The Assistant”, people are always talking about a new life, a better life. Settling, compromise and defeat on the one hand versus authenticity, self realisation and new life on the other. Then there’s the question of generations. The old, often hopeless, often sad with their memories of East Europe and the old country. Morris’ memories of childhood in the old country. “The sudden, deep remembrance of the snowy Polish village "where he’d wasted his youth,” Malamud writes in “The First Seven Years”. Out of a world of dispossessed strangers writes Arthur Foff in “The Northwest Review” in 1958. Two characters, often an older man and a younger man meet. Yet once a cosmic accidentalism has crossed these two lives, the characters are transfixed in a long and agonising manner. The irrelevant chance meeting becomes a necessary relationship.

In 1979, Philip Roth published one of his greatest books, certainly one of my favourites. Certainly one of his greatest early works, “The Ghost Writer”, it was the first of his nine novels narrated by his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman, based on the young Roth, is a promising young writer who spends a night in the home of E.I. Lonoff, an established writer whom Zuckerman idolises. Lonoff is an austere, older writer living a secluded life in the New England countryside, closely modelled on Malamud. Zuckerman describes how Lonoff’s excruciating scrupulosity, the same maddening, meticulous attention to every last detail that makes you great. Then there’s a third writer in addition to Lonoff and Zuckerman, Felix Abravanel. Clearly based on Bellow, then in his prime. A handsome, charismatic man of electric intellect who dismissed Lonoff stroke Malamud as so self-sufficiently pared down as to be as unimpressive as he was unimpressed. Malamud’s publisher, Roger Strauss, as in Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the leading literary publishers in America shared this dark sense of Malamud.

When Straus was asked if he thought of a biography of Malamud, he laughed, “It’s ridiculous, there was nothing there. "As a life it was unexciting. "Bellow was fillet mignon, Malamud was hamburger.” When Bellow won the Nobel Prize in 1976, a recognition that eluded Malamud and Roth, Malamud wrote in his notebook, “21st of October, Bellow gets Nobel Prize. "I win $24.25 in poker.” Roth first met Malamud in Oregon, in February 1961. Malamud was almost 50, Roth was still in his 20s. Malamud had published two major novels, “The Natural” and “The Assistant” and was just about to complete a third novel and he’d published his best book of short stories, “The Magic Barrel”. But there is a big but. Roth was about to overtake Malamud. These poor, Jewish immigrants that Malamud made his subject belonged to that moment in the 50s. Roth by contrast found a new subject, in fact he found several new subject areas but the first new subject he found was a new generation in his first book of stories, “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1959, Jews in the suburbs. Roth had already met Bellow in May 57, at the University of Chicago.

Bellow later wrote to Roth, “But I knew when I hit Chicago, was it 12 years ago? "And read your stories that you were the real thing. "When I was a little kid, "there were still blacksmiths around "and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer "on a real anvil.” This letter tells us something very particular about the relationship between the three men. Bellow and Roth knew that they were both the real thing and that they were quickly going to leave Malamud behind. Salman Rushdie, a great admirer of Bellow and Roth but not interestingly of Malamud, later wrote when Roth died in 2018, “Roth and Bellow, Bellow and Roth, "the two writers are forever yoked together, "at least in the minds of writers of my generation. "To give again, the view from elsewhere, "for Martin Amos, Ian McEwan and myself, "these were the two American writers "who not only showed us America most clearly, "most brilliantly, who took the American Jewish novel "and transformed it into something pretty close "to the great American novel "but who also opened doors in our own heads, "helping us to see more clearly "how to make the worlds we were trying to make.”

For Rushdie and many others, Roth’s death marked the end of an era in post-war American literature, he and Bellow had reinvented Jewish American writing, creating a new voice, mixing high and low, humour and melancholy, an elegiac sense of the Jewish immigrant past and a new take on American politics and history from Lindbergh and Korea to Nixon and Clinton. From mid 20th Century Chicago, to the burnt out neighbourhoods of Newark. After Roth died, the tributes poured out. They agreed that Roth was probably the greatest American writer of his generation. This wasn’t always the case, during the 70s, there was much debate about whether he was in the same league as Bellow. Bellow had just won the Nobel Prize and in 75, he published his fourth great novel, “Humboldt’s Gift”. Roth seemed curiously adrift, the 70s were not his best years. “1971, 1972 and 1973,” writes Martin Amos, “Roth, clearly something of a genius, "pulled off three unqualified duds. "20 years later however in the 90s, "critics began to ask whether Bellow was too formulaic "and worse still for a younger generation of readers, "too cranky and right wing. ”‘Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulu’s?’, “Bellow asked in the 1990s, ‘The Proust of the Papuans?’”

This could’ve been Bellow’s epitaph, it may still prove to be his epitaph. The way he wrote about women, the way he wrote about Blacks in America sat very, very badly with a younger generation of readers in the last 30 years. He continued publishing novels up till 2000, but there was a falling away in the last 20 years of his life. Just as Bellow started to decline, Roth found an astonishing new voice and completely reinvented himself. Four great novels, great novels in five years and the plaudits and awards flowed, but not the Nobel Prize. Think of those great set pieces, the Chinese restaurant scene in “The Human Stain”, the high school reunion at the beginning of “American Pastoral”, Nixon’s funeral in “I Married a Communist”, those long, flowing sentences, the extraordinary images, the energy of his prose and the new elegiac tone. Above all, Roth found his greatest subject.

When he died, the front page of “Liberation”, the French newspaper said simply, “Philip Roth, American Eros”. Had anyone written about sex like Roth? But according to Dwight Garner in “The New York Times”, after sex, mortality was perhaps Roth’s great subject. “Old age isn’t a battle”, Roth wrote in his novel “Everyman”, “old age is a massacre.” Or perhaps it was the self, perhaps that was his great subject. “No modern writer,” wrote Martin Amos in the 80s, “perhaps no writer has taken self examination so far "and so literally.” Elsewhere Amos wrote that Roth’s subject was himself, himself, himself. Not just some abstract self but suffering, raging, middle-aged Jewish suburban man, divorced, often childhood, always in flight. Nathan Zuckerman fleeing from his entanglements as he calls them. Sabbath absconditus, his life was one long flight in “Sabbath’s Theatre”, from what? Critics may argue about how important these are to Roth’s work but what they all agree on is that in the 1990s, Roth found his true subject, his defining subject and perhaps the subject for which he will always be remembered, America. Or rather, a particular vision of America which caught the mood of the times.

Born in 1933, he was formed by the New Deal and the idealism of the Second World War. Roth wrote eloquently about the America of FDR, the war and the GI Bill, the hardworking Jews of Newark and that great, post-war moment caught by the scene of the high school reunion in “American Pastoral”. “This”, wrote one critic, “is what gave him the absolutely unambiguous sense he gained "during that war and because of that victory, "of belonging to the greatest nation on earth. "Then came the fall, no one has caught the mood "of what Roth called the indigenous American berserk like Roth.” America amok to use his phrase. The trauma of Vietnam, broken families, political correctness gone mad in the human stain. Liberalism and decency under assault. And no one has written about what happened to American cities like Roth, not even Bellow. Think of Alvin Pepler’s rant at Nathan Zuckerman in “Zuckerman Unbound”. “What do you know about Newark mama’s boy? "Newark’s bankruptcy, Newark is ashes, "Newark is rubble and filth.”

At the end of the novel, Zuckerman visits Newark, the two-story apartment building where he had first lived was a ruin, the building’s front door was also gone, torn from its hinges and to either side of the missing door, the large windows, looking into the foyer had lost their glass who were boarded over. The building had become a slum. This is why the American flag is so important to Roth’s great 1990s novels. The rural post office with an American flag that gets blown to pieces in “American Pastoral”. Sabbath, wrapped in his brother’s American flag in “Sabbath’s Theatre”. “He took the flag down with him onto the beach, "there he unfurled it, "a flag with 48 stars, wrapped himself in it and wept "and wept.” Critics have not only agreed that Roth’s greatest subject was America, they also agreed about the Roth canon. The key works were “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1959 and “Portnoy’s Complaint” at the end of the 60s and then the great tetralogy, the American novels in “Sabbath’s Theatre”, “The Plot Against America” and I would add, “The Ghost Writer” in 79.

However there is something troubling about the way critics write about Roth. They miss so much about him. First, finding a subject and a voice was not easy for Roth. It is much more complicated and interesting than it seemed to his critics when he died. Let’s go back to Roth’s visit to Bernard Malamud in Oregon in 1961. There’s another writer in “The Ghost Writer”, Anne Frank. What is interesting about this appearance of Anne Frank is not the shock value, though it is of course shocking but what Roth does with her. Frank of course, has a subject too. One of the subjects of the 20th Century, this is the point. Zuckerman, like Roth has missed the great subjects of 20th Century Jewish history. He was too young to have experienced the great tide of immigration in the old country. At the same time, born in safe America, he was spared the great traumas of mid 20th Century Europe. Throughout his career, Roth searches for a subject. From the Jewish suburbs of “Goodbye, Columbus” to Prague and Israel and then to America’s post-war history which critics called his American turn and of course, there’s another novelist in “The Ghost Writer”, Felix Abravanel. “A writer who found irresistible all vital "and dubious types,” Roth writes.

Not excluding the swindlers of both sexes who trampled upon the large hearts of his optimistic, undone heroes. Abravanel of course is Bellow. Zuckerman heard him speak as Chicago, just as the young Roth had met Bellow in Chicago at a literature class. It’s clear what Malamud and Frank are doing in “The Ghost Writer” but what’s Bellow stroke Abravanel doing there? Bellow was hugely important to Roth, he was, in Roth’s words, “The other I have read from the beginning "with the deepest pleasure and admiration,” he wrote in the dedication to “Reading Myself and Others” in 1975. They met in 57 and remained close friends till Bellow’s death almost 50 years later. Roth was at Bellow’s funeral, along with Martin Amos. Why did Malamud and Bellow matter so much to Roth? First, we should remember one crucial thing that people often overlook when talking about Roth. Roth was a great writer, without question. He was also a great reader and critic, especially of the writers who mattered most to him. Malamud and Bellow were great writers of course. The big names on the block when Roth was starting out.

Roth was always more interested in literary father figures than sons. He wrote more about Bellow and Malamud than the new young writers like Michael Shea and Jonathan Safran Foer. They did two things for Roth, Malamud and Bellow, first, crucially, they showed the younger Roth he could write about the Jewish American experience, they established it as a subject. Before “Augie March” and “The Assistant”, who had taken Jewish-American life into the mainstream? The crucial words here are into the mainstream. “Augie March” was the first time a Jewish writer had won the National Book Award. Crucial moment. It is hard to imagine today how highly Malamud was thought of in the 1950s. Secondly, Bellow and Malamud represented two very different ways of breaking through. Roth wrote about Malamud’s locutions, inversions and dictions of Jewish-American speech, a heap of broken verbal bones. So little laughter he wrote. Bellow was the very opposite.

As Roth wrote about “The Adventures of Augie March”, “Bellow overthrows everything. "In ‘Augie March’ a very grand, assertive, "freewheeling conception of both the novel "and the world the novel represents breaks loose "from all sorts of self-imposed strictures "and like the characters of "five properties and ‘Augie March’, "the writer is himself hipped on super abundance.” One of Bellow’s greatest phrases. “I didn’t know what freedom was in a writer "until I read that book,” Roth said. That you can do anything, that you can go anywhere. Above all, Bellow brought together the high and the low. “He managed brilliantly,” wrote Roth, “to close the gap between Thomas Mann "and Damon Runyon.” This is the second point many critics of Roth have missed, he was a great writer but he really was an outstanding reader and critic. He learned so much from Bellow and Malamud of course, but more surprisingly, from European and Israeli writers like Aharon Appelfeld and Primo Levi, Ivan Klima, Milan Kundera and Norman Manea the Hungarian.

They gave Roth something very different. Roth was one of the few American writers to immerse himself in the “Writers from the Other Europe”, the title of a Penguin series he edited in the 1970s and 80s which introduced a whole generation to East European writers like Bruno Schulz and Milan Kundera. When Roth first met Appelfeld in 1984, “Badenheim 1939” and “The age of wonders”, arguably Appelfeld’s two greatest novels had only just been translated. Klima and Manea are not that well-known to English-speaking readers even now. We so associate Roth with America that we forget how interested he was in writers from Bukovina and Chernivtsi. There is something else about this group, they can be divided into Holocaust writers and dissidents from behind the Iron Curtain. Like Anne Frank, they had no trouble in finding a subject. In the opening sentence of Roth’s interview with Ivan Klima, a Czech writer, Roth writes, “Born in Prague in 1931, "Ivan Klima has undergone what Jan Kott calls "a European education.”

Kundera, to whom “The Ghost Writer” was dedicated, Klima, Appelfeld and Manea were all born within a few years of Roth but by the time Roth started high school in Newark, New Jersey, Appelfeld had lost his mother and grandmother, shot by the Nazis and he’d escaped from a ghetto and spent years hiding in the woods. Klima and Manea had been transported with their parents to concentration camps, or as Roth puts it in his novel “Operation Shylock” in 1993, where Appelfeld makes an appearance, hiding as a child from his murderers in the Ukrainian woods while I was still on a Newark playground playing flycatchers up. That’s what Roth means by a European education. That’s what drew him to these writers. Bellow and Malamud showed the younger writer that there was a Jewish American subject. The Europeans, the east Europeans showed him there was another kind of Jewish subject altogether and very different ways of writing about it.

It’s easy to forget in other words, that the all-American Roth, author of a novel about baseball and another about Nixon had carefully read and thought about his European Jewish contemporaries. Of course his best work is also full of references to Hawthorne, to Melville, to Sherwood Anderson but there’s still also another question. What if he’d been born in Europe, not Newark in 1933? When we think of “Portnoy’s ComplainI” in 1969, we think of Roth and sex, especially that scene. What we don’t think of is the scene between Portnoy and his older sister Hannah. “Do you know,” she asked, “where you’d be now if you’d been born in Europe "instead of America?” He doesn’t have an answer, so she tells him, “Dead, gassed or shot or incinerated or butchered "or buried alive.” The key phrase here is, if you’d been born in Europe instead of America. Or what if some of the great European figures like Kafka and Anne Frank had come to America?

Roth plays with this idea. He was of course, a playful writer. Imagining alter egos and counterfactual histories, what if Charles Lindbergh had been American President instead of Roosevelt in “The Plot Against America”? But what’s interesting is the kind of counterfactual histories he imagines. European history coming to America. In the early part of his career, he felt that American history was too small, not interesting enough. When he returned to America at the end of the 1980s, he’d made a decision which changed his career. American history was plenty big enough. From the xenophobic right in the 30s and Korea and McCarthyism in the 50s to Nixon and Vietnam in the 60s and Clinton, race and political correctness at the end of the century. No more Kafka and Anne Frank, now the references were to the American classics. Roth had a sense of several traditions, American certainly but also Jewish and European. This is why Roth keeps working away at the place of Jews in America. Take this extraordinary piece of shtick about Irving Berlin in “Operating Shylock” in 1993.

“The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, ”‘This is Jewish genius on a par with the 10 Commandments. “'God gave Moses the 10 Commandments ”'and then he gave to Irving Berlin Easter Parade “'and White Christmas.’ "The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ, "the divinity that’s at the very heart "of the Jewish rejection of Christianity "and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? "He dechrists them both. "Easter he turns into a fashion show "and Christmas into a holiday about snow. "Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ, "down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet. "He turns their religion into shlock but nicely, nicely, "so nicely the goyim don’t even know what’s hit them. "They love it, everybody loves it. "The Jews especially, Jews loathe Jesus. "People always tell me Jesus is Jewish, "I never believe them. "It’s like when people used to tell me "Cary Grant was Jewish. "Bullshit, Jews don’t want to hear about Jesus "and can you blame them? "So Bing Crosby replaces Jesus "as the beloved Son of God and the Jews, "the Jews go around whistling about Easter. "And is that so disgraceful a means of defusing "the enmity of centuries? "Is anyone really dishonoured by this? "If shlock-ified Christianity "is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, "then three cheers for shlock. "If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow "can enable my people to cosy up to Christmas "then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

Who else could play with the idea of a Jewish immigrant like Irving Berlin writing the greatest songs ever written about Christmas, “White Christmas” and Easter, “Easter Parade”. Jews are of course one of Roth’s great subjects, they’re everywhere. From his first book, “Goodbye, Columbus”. Green lawns, white Jews as one of Roth’s characters says some 30 years later in “Operation Shylock” to the anti-Semitism in “Indignation” 50 years later. But it’s not just that Roth’s fiction is full of Jews, angry, crazy, masturbating, serious, funny. It’s how much he does with his Jews. He was writing about the Holocaust 10 years before Bellow in that great short story “Eli, the Fanatic”. “Eli, the Fanatic” is not only one of the great American short stories and it really is, it’s also one of the great pieces of fiction about the Holocaust. Some of his Jewish families are safe and secure, enjoying that extraordinary moment of post-war American prosperity, the Jewish success story in its heyday, all new and thrilling and funny and fun, but in the plot against America, they’re fleeing for their lives. Victims of the American life.

Reviewing that novel in the New York Review of Books, J. M. Coetzee, the South African novelist, pinpoints the key questions at its heart. What is it to be a Jew in America? Does a Jew belong in America? Can America be his or her true home? Roth was once asked, “What is distinctive about Jewish writing?” “It’s not the subject matter,” he said. “It’s about a particular kind of sensibility. "The nervousness he said. "The excitability, the arguing, the dramatising, "the indignation, the obsessiveness, the touchiness, "the playacting, above all the talking.” It’s a funny answer and not untrue. What it misses out though is what he learned from Levy, Appelfeld and Manea. What Roth knew and what the tributes didn’t really get is the dark side of Jewish life in America. Anti-Semitism from Lindbergh in the 30s, to a small town college at the time of the Korean War, to Haldeman talking to Nixon in our gang. “There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews "and the anti-Semites are with us generally "and the Jews sure aren’t.” That was 1971. Roth did many things with Jews but one thing he did in particular was to paint them into the American landscape.

Take the small town college in “Indignation” in 2008, one of those small novels that he wrote at the end of his life. The college is in Winesburg, Ohio, the name of a famous book by Sherwood Anderson. Anderson’s Winesburg doesn’t have any Jews. Roth takes his Jewish narrator Marcus Messner there. It’s not an homage, he’s doing something else. He’s imagining what happens if you put a Jew in Winesburg. Just as his great American novels, in his great American novels, he puts his great Jewish character, Nathan Zuckerman, in rural Connecticut. His fiction is full of American literary references and he seemed remarkably at home in all kinds of American places. From Newark and the Upper West Side to small town New England. But he adds Jews to the landscape. Critics write about how American Roth was. Of course he was, he was invited to the White House to receive awards from two different Presidents. He was one of the very few living American writers to see his work published in a multi-volume Library of America series.

But Roth’s writing on America is more complicated than this suggests. Roth’s is a very distinctive America. America plus Jews plus Europe. He kept thinking about what to do with his Jewishness as a writer and what to do with what he’d learned from those European writers. Bellow of course was just as American, just as Jewish and just as European. It’s easy to miss this because Bellow’s writing is always so recognisable. First, there’s that voice. From “The Adventures of Augie March” in the early 50s, that voice stayed the same for half a century. Part Russian, part American, part Jewish. It is the literary equivalent of the opening of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue”. From his Russian roots, he picked up a love of big ideas and a kind of soulfulness and melancholy.

Then from his childhood in Chicago, the younger brother of two larger than life machas. He found a verbal energy and love of street language that sets him apart from any of his contemporaries. Roth once wrote that Bellow’s novels gave voice to the language you spoke and the stuff you heard, the American argo that you heard on the street. “What other writer,” wrote Martin Amos, “has such a reflexive grasp of the street, "the machine, the law courts, the rackets?” We first heard that voice in “Augie March”. Think of its opening sentence, perhaps the greatest opening sentence in American literature since “Moby-Dick” or “The Whale”. “I’m an American Chicago-born. "Chicago, that sombre city and goeth things "as I’ve taught myself freestyle "and will make the record in my own way. "First to knock, first admitted, "sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” What is striking here and in all his best writing is the torrent of words. It just pours out. “The book just came to me,” Bellow wrote later. “All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.”

That opening sentence has it all, Chicago with its hustlers and tough guys. Then there are those opening words, I’m an American. Bellow has tapped into an American literary tradition that goes back to Thomas Sawyer and Huck Finn, more redskin than paleface. Youthful and energetic and then comes the Jewish component. The Yiddish words. Remember that there were hardly any leading Jewish writers among the great American writers between the wars. Bellow translated Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”, just sat down at a table and translated it to a partisan review. He translated T.S. Eliot as a young man into Yiddish. It is true he hardly wrote about the Holocaust until the late 60s and Israel barely features in his novels. However, Jewishness runs through Bellow’s writing like mustard and mayo in a perfect pastrami sandwich. Old Testament morality, nostalgic evocations of the old immigrant world and above all, the rhythms of his prose. It’s a language in which Russian Jewish immigrant meets mid-century Chicago, unlike anything modern literature had ever seen.

All of this starts in “Augie March” and Philip Roth, the best writer on Bellow is good on the particular kind of Jewishness we find there. Bellow takes the sentimental nostalgia for Irving Howe called the world of our fathers but then adds a shock of high energy America. In “Augie March”, Roth said to Bellow in an interview, you plugged into Jewish aggression and Jews as businessmen, that’s what’s at the heart of your book which is the small-time lawyers, the owners of the middle-sized businesses, the conniving and the cheating. You are not ashamed of Jewish aggression because you saw it as American aggression. It was Chicago aggression. Perhaps this goes back to Bellow’s childhood, like most of his central characters, Bellow was the smart bookish one. Preoccupied with what he later called the deeps. His brothers though were both tough, self-made men who started out in the coal business and became millionaires. Bellow’s books bring together men of the world like his brothers and people like Herzog, with their heads always in a book.

Worrying about big ideas about literature and philosophy. Heraclitus appears in the second sentence of “Augie March”. Herzog is named after a character for James Joyce and is writing a book about the roots of romanticism. But in “Augie March” we soon meet Joe Kinsman, the undertaker’s son. And on page five of Herzog, we hear about how Herzog’s sexual powers had been damaged by Madeline. Romanticism and sexual damage, Heraclitus and Joe Kinsman, that mix of the high and low constantly churning together is at the heart of the genius of Saul Bellow. Bellow and Roth were at their height in the mid and late 20th Century but there’s something about their aggression, the way they write about women in Black neighbourhoods, that a new generation finds very troubling. Once the question was which was the greater writer, now critics and students wonder whether either was as good as Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith or Maya Angelou. Their novels no longer pile up in Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side or appear on reading lists in the best American universities if there is such a thing anymore.

Bellow and Roth reinvented American writing, finding a new voice, new subjects, a new comic aggression. This is why it’s had such a huge impact on the next generation of Jewish American writers. Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon and a new generation of British authors, Martin Amos, Rushdie, McEwen. Also looking for a new voice, trying to invent the post-war British novel. Which was the greater writer, Bellow or Roth? It sounds a simple question, but it’s surprisingly complicated and involves exploring how two very different writers reinvented American literature. What they added, what they brought together, the new voice they created which included modernism but wasn’t just modernist which added Jews but wasn’t just Jewish. Which was literary and bookish but also full of history, politics and a changing vision of America. In very different ways, they created a new kind of American writing. Streetwise and literary, Jewish and American. So that is my take on these three great American writers and I see that there are already a number of questions.

Q&A and Comments

So Marilyn’s iPad.

Q: Would you place Neil Simon among the three? A: No I wouldn’t, A, sorry to be rude and brusque about this but absolutely not. Firstly because Neil Simon was a playwright, the others weren’t. But I wouldn’t even include Arthur Miller among them because to me, those three are the great American novelists. There is a question which a literature professor raised to me in an email after my talk last week, what about the American women writers? Jewish American women writers, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick and so on. Let me say absolutely up front, they’re both terrific, terrific writers but I still wouldn’t put them up with Bellow, Roth and Malamud. That may have to be for another moment.

Q: David Garfield, doesn’t allow me to leave that for another moment ‘cause he says all of these are about men, why? A: David, because they are the great writers. There are no Jewish American women writers as great. There are great Jewish American women writers. As I said Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick would be at the top of my list. But they are not, they did not have the impact of Bellow and Roth. In various ways, if you look at their influence as writers, as I said, a whole generation of younger American writers were influenced by Bellow and Roth in a way they were not influenced by Paley and Ozick. Even a woman writer as great as Cynthia Ozick, yes sorry as great as, yeah as great as Cynthia Ozick did not have the same sort of influence. They didn’t have, it was Bellow and Roth who had the great influence on Bellow and Amos and McEwen. And Rushdie. They had this terrific influence in people trying to reinvent the British novel in a way that Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick didn’t. Partly because, I’m sure that there was a kind of element of sexism in American literary criticism and in English literary criticism during this period which meant that men got more time or respect but they also sold more. They had a greater influence and they sold more and that’s, and they were greater writers. Much as I love Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley, so that’s why David in answer to your question, all these three are men.

Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve now seen David’s followup message. I don’t mean the authors, rather the subjects.

Q: Why do they write about men? A: Well you’ve got to bear in mind these authors are writing between the 1950s and the 2000s and that was not a time in general when male writers wrote superbly about women characters. I mean they did create extraordinary women characters and Philip Roth after all did write about Anne Frank. But, and both Bellow and Roth in particular write about unhappy marriages and terrible daughters. Both of them wrote about terrible daughters. So it’s not that they didn’t write about women but it is true to say that their central characters were men. They were very high testosterone male writers, that is true and that’s why they really, women readers and students and teachers now really struggle with Bellow and Roth and Malamud. Because they feel, rightly, that they’re not really in their heart of hearts, interested in women or in women writers. Although the correspondence between Saul Bellow and Cynthia Ozick is very interesting and there’s one particular exchange which is quite extraordinary which owes a lot to the courage of Cynthia Ozick and the honesty of Saul Bellow. Anyway, that’s the.

And David Garfield, the third of this trilogy of messages except for “Goodbye, Columbus”. Well sure, Roth is very interested in sexual relationships between men and good looking young women but that’s perhaps as much part of the problem as anything else. You know, that he doesn’t take seriously, isn’t sufficiently interested either in older women or in thoughtful, serious women and that is a problem. And that’s why feminist critics have problems with Roth and Bellow and Malamud.

Q: Hilal Shenker, what about J.D. Salinger and the impact of “Catcher on the Rye”? A: I think we got into this last week a little bit. Yes. You know, there are a lot of what I would call one-hit wonders among the great Jewish American writers. I would include Salinger and “The Catcher on the Rye”. I would include Heller’s “Catch-22”, I would include Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night”, not “The Armies of the Night”, “The Naked and the Dead” sorry. That is true of a lot of writers and this was very true of those writers in the 30s that we talked about many weeks ago now, before Christmas. The difference is there is a big difference between writing one hugely successful novel and writing a shelf full of great novels and short stories. There really is a big difference and the difference between the pre-war Jewish American writers and the post 1950s Jewish American writers, in particular Bellow and Roth is that the earlier generation just couldn’t keep sustaining a long literary career. They couldn’t produce big novel after big novel which spoke to middle America and mainstream America. Critics and reviewers and academics and ordinary readers and Roth and Bellow could. Malamud arguably couldn’t really. He wrote perhaps three major novels. That’s a fair number and a lot of terrific short stories, including the book of short stories, “The Magic Barrel”. So I don’t wish to minimise Malamud at all but Roth and Bellow, they just churned out big, major novels that were hugely successful commercially, hugely successful critically. They won big prizes these guys and Bellow after all won the Nobel Prize which is a tough ask for an American writer because the damn Swedish Nobel committee are so anti-American. For them never to have given Roth the award is one of the great scandals of all literary prizes. Anyway, there we are.

So that’s what about J.D. Salinger and it’s an interesting question because it does raise this much larger question about what makes a great writer. Is it somebody? I mean the classical example of course would be Dickens. How many great novels did Dickens write? That’s perhaps why he’s the greatest novelist in the English-speaking world. Herman Melville wrote many terrific novels, I’m a huge Melville fan. But how many would you say are great novels? Same with Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter”, great novel. How many great novels did Hawthorne write? We should recognise, acknowledge, that there is a distinction between those writers who wrote great novel after great novel and those who wrote one or two or even three great novels and this is I suppose where I would differ with some that might argue that Malamud belongs up with them. I wouldn’t say he does and has aged badly as a consequence.

Q: Judy B says, “Both Roth and Bellow are very problematic on women.” Yes. “There is a kind of erotic passion for women in both and at the same time an intense dislike of women. Any thoughts on this?” A: Judy, I couldn’t agree more. There is an intense dislike of women. Bellow, I’ve lost track of how many marriages and terrible divorces Bellow had. I’ve lost track of how many marriages and affairs and terrible marriages Roth had and he famously wrote about his disastrous marriage with Claire Bloom and his loathing for both her and her daughter. So I think, I think it’s also a particular moment in Jewish American male life I would say. In the 50s, 60s and 70s in particular. I think it’s also true of Mailer, I think it’s also true of Bellow. I think it’s also true of Arthur Miller, none of them really wrote about great female characters. Miller’s great characters are all men. Willy Loman, the wives tend to be sort of stooges on the side, rather silent like the wife in that wonderful Norbert Leo comedy series, “All in the Family”. It’s the men who stand centre stage and partly that is about when they were written and when they were writing and partly it’s about the kinds of men they were. Maybe it’s about the kinds of Jewish men they were. I’m very open to a discussion about that, that’s very possible.

So you know, I think that is, that is an issue. And you’re very right to say they’re very problematic on women and for all women readers and women writers. Although one should say, if you’ve read the last three biographies of Philip Roth which all came out around the same time, it’s very interesting how many women visited Roth in hospital when he was dying, how many women friends went to his funeral and spoke at his funeral, how many women friends went to his memorial service and read or spoke at his memorial service. This includes some very interesting women, Mia Farrow, Zadie Smith and as I said, Cynthia Ozick’s correspondence with Bellow is very interesting and Cynthia Ozick is no fool. She knew there were tough, interesting questions to ask Bellow, not about women but about why he hadn’t written about the Holocaust for long so you know, that’s, those are all interesting points that it’s worth mentioning because a lot of people said about those three biographies, oh they show how what a misogynist Roth was. They don’t, they actually show how deep and rich many of his relationships, particularly his friendships with women writers, critics, women were. So that is worth bearing in mind.

Q: Monty’s iPad, the writers you speak of, did any of them do a creative writers course? A: Yes, so many institutions offer them now. To be a novelist of stature now, one does need to do one. Well that’s where they really took off was in America, these creative writers courses and Malamud taught creative writing in Oregon for many years and Roth and Bellow, particularly when they were younger both did a lot of that kind of teaching. So yes they did. And Bellow later, when he was on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago was on the faculty there and taught the great writers courses and the great thinkers courses. The kind of Plato tomato kind of courses, which he continued to do when he moved to Boston, at Boston University. So yes they did, they taught both creative writing and also literary history, literary criticism, intellectual criticism and so on.

Q: Layla Glancy, why are there no photos, text redactions, book covers, et cetera, et cetera. Just Herman’s profile throughout? He’s speaking to his feeling has left, why does Mister Herman believe this is interesting? A: Well Layla I’m very sorry if you don’t find it interesting. I don’t do photos, I don’t do text redactions, I don’t do book covers. I don’t find book covers, except for Ben Shahn’s wonderful book covers of Saul Bellow terribly interesting, I’m afraid. And so I go for words rather than photos of book covers and I’m sorry that that has left you unhappy and dissatisfied. So my apologies for that.

Judy B., it’s many years since I’ve read Roth’s, “The Counterlife” but I remember being fascinated by his view of a very English kind of anti-Semitism. Any thoughts on this? You are absolutely right Judy, yes. He did have a terribly negative view of English anti-Semitism. Not that many people I suppose have a very positive view of it but he was very sensitive to it and spent a lot of time in England because he was married, particularly during his marriage with Claire Bloom and so he was, so he spent a lot of time in England and then as you rightly say, he wrote “The Counterlife”. And yes, he was appalled by English anti-Semitism. What he would’ve made of English anti-Semitism today or indeed England today, I frankly shudder to think and that would be a very interesting counterfactual history to write I suppose. I think if anything, he was perhaps more severe about English anti-Semitism than perhaps he should’ve been. Perhaps he had rather an exaggerated sense of it coming as an American Jew.

But on the other hand, so did Frederic Raphael. So perhaps it wasn’t a question of his Americanness, maybe they both sensed something rather nasty going on in English life and culture but as I say, if they were around now, well Frederic Raphael is around now. But if they were thinking and writing about English anti-Semitism today, I would be very, very interested to read what they would make of it. And indeed, American anti-Semitism of course. Thank you Patricia’s iPad for you very, very kind words. And thank you Lina S. I read the three authors years ago but now I’m tempted to revisit each one of them. Do, please. I think, I hope you’ll really enjoy revising them. I think they’re great, great writers in very different ways. Lorna Sandler, as I said before, I should’ve liked portraits of these writers and more quotes from their work. Well I think there was quite a lot of quotes from their work and I think there were a lot of portraits of these writers but I supposed they would be what I would call critical portraits of these writers. As literary criticism and putting them in context and talking about their lives and their work, rather than other kinds of portraits perhaps. Carol Stott, thank you so much for your kind words. Yonna Yappu, Alfred Krumholtz, Chaim Potok, Mordecai Richler.

Okay, Canadian but still Western Hemisphere English. Yes and I’m going to say the same as I said earlier, in response to somebody else. Just not in the same league and I think you know, we have to make distinctions. Whether we’re talking about artists, composers, writers, critics, whatever we’re talking about, historians. We have to make distinctions between the great and the less great and sometimes that boils down to how prolific they are and sometimes it boils down to just how good they are. And you know, I don’t wish to decry Potok and Richler, they’re both really fine writers. But I think, the reason it matters I would say is because what do we find out when we start thinking about and reading writers like Bellow and Roth or indeed, Paley and Ozick? And the younger generation of writers. What does it make us think about? How do we think about them and the way they write and what influenced them and you know, those are interesting questions and we usually find, I think, that the more you think about Bellow, Roth, Ozick, Paley, maybe Heller or Mailer, Arthur Miller, you just keep, they keep on giving. In a way, I’m afraid to say and I’ve written about both Potok and Richler, I don’t think they do. And not in the same way, not sufficiently to be considered great writers and I’m sorry if that sounds snobbish. Rosa, thank you so much for your very generous message and Erica also.

Q; What about Norman Mailer asks Lina S. A: Well what about Norman Mailer? I mean you know, his breakthrough novel, “The Naked and the Dead” in the late 40s, a classic war novel and then really he became a controversialist. He went where the action was. He wrote about Nixon, he wrote about Marilyn Monroe. He wrote about Picasso, he wrote about some famous controversial figures. He made the headlines in all kinds of ways, good and very often bad. He was a terrible misogynist, he was a bruiser. He had bitter rivalries for example with Raul Vidal and I think again, the years have not been kind to Norman Mailer I would say. And I would be very interested to know how many of you or your children or your grandchildren read Norman Mailer or I say with this more regret, Joseph Heller these days. You know, and I think, as I said in both the last two talks, you know, they’re clearly, for many younger readers, and many women readers, the jury is out on Bellow and Roth, or perhaps worse still, the jury’s in.

And I’m sorry, I’ve just realised that I’m out of time. So Claudia Yutlman, I’m sorry I haven’t come around to your question about Vivian Gornick. Thank you all so much for as always, your fascinating questions, your really kind words, and I will see you very, very soon on a different subject and I look forward to seeing you all then and thank you again for signing in.