Rough: A Journey into the Drafts of Portnoy’s Complaint

A month ago, I was on the phone with a librarian in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, inquiring about the papers of Philip Roth. Would I need to specify in advance which boxes — among the 300 Roth left, measuring 122.6 linear feet — I wished to consult? Not at all, he told me: "Philip is on site so we can call him up and get him to you in five minutes."

His language was charmingly informal, reflecting an archivist's intimacy with his materials, but also a little jarring. It was odd to think that Roth, despite being interred at Bard College Cemetery on May 28, 2018 (at a ceremony where Jewish rituals were expressly forbidden), was alive and well and living at the Library of Congress. And odder still to imagine that the notoriously guarded author, who moved to the countryside after the success of Portnoy's Complaint, had been converted by his archive into a different sort of person — a chummy and amenable fellow, on call and happy to submit to my devices. Anyone could tramp, as I soon did, into the Manuscripts Room of the Library of Congress and, ten minutes later, peruse some dark muddled fantasy that Roth had committed to paper, then chosen never to publish.

Officially, I told myself, I was there not because I wanted to meet "Philip" but because I wanted to understand how Roth the novelist had birthed Portnoy's Complaint. Portnoy is far from my favorite Roth book: I find that it curdles, albeit meaningfully, as it goes along, its jokes wearing thin as the adult Alex Portnoy remains trapped by his sexual fixations — a narcissist "locked up in me," as he admits. (Notably, in popular memory Portnoy's Complaint is often reduced to scenes from the first 37 of its 274 pages, in which Alex is a young child and teenager.) Still, the drama of Portnoy's composition sits at the heart of perhaps the most meaningful literary-historical enigma of Roth's career: the novel marked the breakthrough, in literary technique and commercial success, that set the terms of possibility for the rest of Roth's life as a writer, but that breakthrough was notoriously difficult to come by.1

Writing Portnoy took five years, during which Roth was artistically adrift, psychologically wracked, and economically hard-pressed. He had rocketed to renown with the National Book Award-winning Goodbye Columbus in 1960, and he still had enough charm and cachet, in late 1964, to date a freshly widowed Jackie Kennedy. (Kissing her felt like kissing a billboard, he later reflected — and, anyway, he didn't have the wardrobe to maintain the relationship past a few dates.) But his two big post-Columbus bids at literary seriousness, the sprawling Letting Go and the restrained When She Was Good, were commercial failures and critical misses. (A typical review: "the kind of bad book that only a good writer could have written.") He churned through a series of artistic projects that often generated hundreds of pages and never came to fruition: a Chekhovian play about a young couple in crisis; a whimsical novel built around a baby dropped off at a Jewish home for the elderly; a set of stories revolving around the patients of a single psychoanalyst; a serious-minded novel titled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jewish Man, which later morphed into a semi-serious novel titled The Nice Jewish Boy; and several stories revolving around sex-hungry Jewish men, with titles like "The Sex Fiend" and "The Age of Jane Fonda".2

It was not a period in his life that Roth romanticized in retrospect; the bitterness lingered. "Alimony and recurrent court costs had bled me of every penny I could earn by teaching and writing, and, hardly into my thirties, I was thousands of dollars in debt to my friend and editor, Joe Fox," he told the Paris Review in 1984. "The loan was to help pay for my analysis, which I needed primarily to prevent me from going out and committing murder because of the alimony and court costs incurred for having served two years in a childless marriage."3

I was curious to explore the thousands of pages of "wreckage" (Roth's term) out of which he had salvaged Portnoy — to understand better what was there through what had been cut. Even after he hit a roll in his career with the Zuckerman novels, Roth was given to describing his writing process as an excruciating struggle: "[A] book takes me two years, if I'm lucky. Eight hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You have to sit alone in a room with only a tree out the window to talk to. You have to sit there churning out draft after draft of crap, waiting like a neglected baby for one drop of mother's milk."4

What awaited me, then, in the expansive archive around Portnoy? Mountains upon mountains of "crap"? Or was Roth low-rating his early drafts, perhaps in a bid to elevate his final product?

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Actually there was quite a bit of crap. One example: early in the process of drafting his Chekhovian drama of a Jewish-goyishe mismatch, Roth brainstormed a list of titles for the play, and they range from the cringe-inducing ("The Good Bitch") to the unenticingly cryptic ("Alone Is a Stone") to the simply banal ("A Perfect Life," "The Good Friends," "Under Control," "A Middle-Class Romance"). He landed on the title "Chekhov, Now," but wondered if it should be "Chekhov, Now?" As he revised the play, he kept cycling through new titles — "The Last Broadway Middle-Class Jewish Family Drama, Or, The End of the Nice Jewish Boy," "Show People," "The Lone Ranger" — before giving up on the play entirely. Poring through the drafts of the play, my eyes glazing over at its clumsy contrivances, I felt some tenderness for the young Roth, trying a new medium but flattening his spirit with every draft he pounded out.

Most of the drafts in Roth's archive, though, are not simply crappy. With uncompleted projects like The Last Jew (Roth's early stab at a fable of Jewish life), there are countless stretches of fluent and lively storytelling, which, because they have no final setting, inhabit the border-zone between the possibly-promising and the possibly-null. And then there are the drafts of the material later excised from Portnoy's Complaint, which range in tone from the delirious to the bilious and suggest a counterintuitive lesson: that Portnoy's Complaint, in its final version, was tautly controlled.

This might seem surprising, because even Portnoy's admirers often praise it for the looseness of its form. Bernard Avishai, in his book devoted to Portnoy, writes, "The effect that endures from the art . . . has been something of a blur. People remember in flashes characters and vignettes. But few can remember the book's architecture or identify any big ideas. Trying to remember the plot is like trying to remember the composition of a Jackson Pollock canvas."5 Roth himself, while brainstorming jacket copy for Portnoy in a notebook, suggested that the novel had an "original form: monologue."6 And indeed, Alexander Portnoy's story does come at us as a series of feverish riffs — "miming," in Mark McGurl's words, "the emotional, improvisational rhythms of a spoken voice, which is also necessarily an embodied voice." For this reason, McGurl argues, Portnoy's true import, from a narratological angle, is as "a symptom of a profoundly . . . phonocentric literary historical moment, when the New Critical ideal of narrative impersonality was rotated into a minor position in relation to a dominant ideal of vocal presence."7 "Find your voice," composition instructors urged, as did the partisans of liberation movements for the historically oppressed; Portnoy showed powerfully how it could be done.

The manuscripts for Portnoy reveal that it was Roth's self-editing — his hacking away at his manuscript — that gave it the flavor of an associative monologue, prickled with a distinctive mix of humor and bitterness, self-justification and self-incrimination. On the level of the book's form, Roth sheared away both the most conventional and the most unconventional sections of his drafts. Gone was the most avant-garde section of Portnoy as well as the sections that read like second-hand Roth. Meanwhile, in his handling of character, he deleted many later sections that might have made the adult Alexander Portnoy more sympathetic, more a victim of circumstance, while leaving in the sections where Portnoy acted in accordance with his desires — which is to say, horribly. The end result of all this editorial effort was to give Portnoy a sense of effortless narrative momentum. Whatever judgment we rendered on Alexander Portnoy (and Roth's edits left his moral flaws in plain view), we had to recognize that as a storyteller, he was unstoppable.

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"I was overthrowing my literary education," Roth said about the writing of Portnoy. "I was overthrowing my first three books."8 In that effort of self-liberation, Roth tested one boundary in particular — the line between far and too far.

Deep into the drafting of the novel, he experimented with a new, disturbingly off-the-wall opening scene: Alexander Portnoy riffing, with defiant delight, over an obscene slideshow, for which his psychoanalyst Dr. Spielvogel serves as a projectionist. Titled "The Jewish Patient Dreams of His Own Salvation," the scene seems to have been a variation on a pre-Portnoy prose experiment, in which a lecturer offers running commentary on the private parts of the famous — an experiment that Roth described later as "mean, bizarre, scatological, [and] tasteless."9 Here the slideshow moves from an opening photo of Portnoy's bris to an extended close-up of his current-day sexual organ. Speaking before an enthusiastic crowd, Portnoy rhapsodizes over its shaft ("veined and strong as marble") and the "masterpiece" of its "crown" — "manly as a spade, charming as a mushroom cap," with the "texture of velvet, the springiness of rubber, and the impact of a plow." His penis, he concludes, "is no mere appendage to my body, such as I was led to believe; rather, the body is nothing less than the penis's pedestal." The "salvation" this Portnoy dreams of is a literal phallocentricism — his shlong as the center of his everything.10

Portnoy is just getting started: he is two pages into a monologue that lasts for twenty-five. It moves onto a discussion of beauty contestants removing, from their orifices, six-inch-lengths of a sixteen-foot "Golden Priapus" so as to assemble the full statue; Portnoy's declaration of a crusade against "PIG" (the "Proclivity for Irrational Guilt"); a snapshot of Portnoy's porn star wife, dressed up as Portnoy's mother and invitingly hitching up her stockings; and a snapshot of Jean Genet's asshole ("I don't believe the Crusade against PIG would have ever gotten off the ground without the terrific job being quietly done all these years in every city, town, a[n]d hamlet . . . by our good homosexual friends"). And then, with a final hyperbolic flourish, it ends with an assault on the ultimate taboo: an exhortation in favor of incest between mothers and sons, and fathers and daughters.11

Roth was wise to strike out this opening. It would have broken with what became the central narrative conceit of Portnoy — that we were eavesdropping on a marathon therapy session between Portnoy and Spielvogel. More significantly still, it would have forced readers to jump into the hypersexual mania of the thirty-three-year-old adult Portnoy without allowing us to experience how his neuroses were seeded by his childhood. The opening scenes of the novel as it stands — the mother threatening her young son with a bread knife when he refuses to eat his dinner; the adolescent Portnoy claiming diarrhea and "whacking off" in the family bathroom, while his mother commands him to "open up this instant" so she can inspect his "poopie" — are not just intensely memorable. They also build, from the start, our sympathy for Portnoy: we are introduced to him as a child trapped by his parents' "fearful sense of life." If he rebels against their taboos, well, this seems to draw him, at first, onto a comic path of liberation and, even, moral growth.12

We'll see, by the end of the novel, how Portnoy is defeated by his own rebellion — how his taboo-busting fails him when it's taken as an end in itself. The rug is pulled out from under any readers who were expecting simply a ribald literary version of a Jewish joke. But you need someone to step on a rug before pulling it out from under them — and this was another problem with the pornographic lecture-opening. Before readers could have a chance to invest in Portnoy's rebellion, it alienated them from it. Every time it described the crowd's "LAUGHTER" and "APPLAUSE" and "SUSTAINED APPLAUSE," the laughter sounded canned — manufactured by Portnoy rather than earned by him, or his author.13

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Unlike the slideshow scene, the great mass of what Roth discarded — chapters bearing titles like "Shiksas," "Abie's Irish Rose," "Oedipus the King," and "I'm Pregnant!" — was more formally conventional than Portnoy became, and more conventionally misogynistic as well. Whereas the final version of Portnoy bounces between Alex's past and his current tortured relationship with Mary Jane Reed, the West Virginian-bred woman he calls "The Monkey," this early version of Portnoy moves in a straight line through the various scenes of his life (undergrad years at a small college in Pennsylvania, a stint in the Army in D.C., an attempt to be an actor in Chicago) and his relationships with women along the way. It ends with Alex meeting his "downfall" and "destiny" in the form of a "grasping, moralistic peasant bitch, the most voracious blond ever to be born in the Middle West, if not all of North America, who I somehow finally married to rescue from her vapid Protestant past — and to whom I now pay a hundred and fifty dollars a week in alimony."14 If the prose feels personally radioactive here, contaminating with its heat and anger, that's because it was. The extended story of Alex's failed marriage was a thinly fictionalized version of Roth's own marriage to Maggie Williams, which Claudia Roth Pierpont has called "the most painfully destructive and lastingly influential literary marriage since Scott and Zelda."15

This early draft of Portnoy might be thought of as the "Playboy philosophy" version: with little irony, it suggests that marriage is a horrible arrangement for men in America, since they no longer need to marry women to enjoy them sexually. In this version, Alex is not at fault when his relationships implode. His well-heeled lover in D.C. abuses her maid as a "big black bitch" after the maid calls her apartment a "pig-pen"; his lover in Chicago is frigid, in the lingo of the times, and ends up leaving him for a woman, who gives her what she needs; and his wife Gretchen feigns pregnancy to trap Alex in a commitment to her.16

Compare this to Alex's relationships in the published novel. He breaks up with his college girlfriend, the stolid and right-minded Kay Campbell (nicknamed "The Pumpkin"), after she wonders why she should convert to Judaism if they marry; calling Portnoy on the bluff of his secularism shuts him down emotionally. And he distances himself from his wealthy young lover in D.C. because, as he recognizes, her state of privilege has boobytrapped his feelings for her: "Intolerant of her frailties. Jealous of her accomplishments. Resentful of her family. No, not much room there for love."17 Alex, in these relationships, is not a victim but a saboteur.

In Alex's most significant adult relationship, with Mary Jane Reed, there is plenty of blame to go around. They begin as opposed archetypes — Alex the conscience-stricken Jew (a leader of New York City's Commission on Human Opportunity) and Mary Jane the pleasure-seeking Gentile (a fashion model) — and together they chase the promise of completion in their union, their respective fetishes goading them on. She gives him a sexual education, and he aims to give her a historical one, leading her through Souls of Black Folk, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Louis Adamic's Dynamite!, Dos Passos's U.S.A., and the like. Alex hopes they'll make "the perfect couple: she puts the id back in Yid, I put the oy back in goy."18 But from archetypes they curdle into caricatures — and here, since we only see their relationship through Alex's eyes, it is Alex who controls the narrative.

If Portnoy begins by raising the flag of the sexual revolution — giving us, with Alex's whacking off, one of the great comic set-pieces of American literature — it ends by shooting that flag to tatters. It's a testament to the power of the novel's early scenes, and to the allure of Roth's rebellion against the repressive mores of the 1950s, that many readers seem to forget how Alex renders judgment on himself. Fleeing from Mary Jane, he condemns the strain of radical politics that equates the liberation of the libido with liberation tout court: "LET MY PETER GO! There, that's Portnoy's slogan. That's the story of my life, all summed up in four heroic dirty words. A travesty! My politics, descended entirely to my putz! JERK-OFF ARTISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BRAINS! The freak I am! Lover of no one and nothing! Unloved and unloving!"19 The ugly last scene of the novel, in which Alex assaults and nearly rapes Naomi, an idealistic Israeli ex-soldier, in a hotel room in Haifa, drives home the truth of Alex's verdict on himself. We as readers continue to listen to him — do we have a choice? — but it's hard to stomach his lack of a sense of proportion. Only a case of impotence, it seems, has kept him from raping Naomi. And yet here is, describing the assault as "a slightly unusual kind of hump" and comparing his actions to someone tearing off the mattress tag that says, "Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law."20

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The question lingers: was Philip Roth exposing the inner workings of misogyny in Portnoy, or was he excusing it by giving it an elaborate back story? The silence of Portnoy's early (male) reviewers on this question suggests that his critique, such as it was, landed largely on deaf ears. I wonder if, by caring about the perspectives of Mary Jane and Naomi, I am reading with or against the grain of the text. Naomi, for instance, is both a moral presence and a marginal figure in her own scene, her pungent remarks and acts of self-defense crowded out by Alex's hyperbolic riffs on his own pain and confusion.

Here the drafts of Portnoy do not solve the riddle, though they might helpfully complicate it. Given that the earlier version of the novel was both more nakedly autobiographical and more transparently possessed by what Roth termed "the erotic furies," it's reasonable to conclude that this is where the novel began — with Roth's anger at his ex-wife Maggie Williams, and with the blinkered sensibility that rage induces.21 An early draft culminated with Gretchen, Portnoy's ex-wife, committing the same act of deception that Williams had perpetrated: buying a urine specimen from a pregnant black woman so that she could leverage the results of a pregnancy test that she claimed as her own. Even late in the drafting of Portnoy, Roth was still testing out an ending in which Mary Jane claimed a dubious pregnancy.22

The experience of completing Portnoy seems to have drawn Roth out of himself and into two separate consciousnesses — the consciousness of Alex Portnoy and the consciousness of Roth the editor of his own work. Asked what he looked for in the act of reading, Roth once said, "I read fiction to be freed from my own suffocatingly boring and narrow perspective on life and to be lured into imaginative sympathy with a fully developed narrative point of view not my own. It's the same reason I write."23 It's a curious thing to suggest, given that Portnoy is such an entrapped neurotic, but impersonating Portnoy broadened Roth, allowing him to serve as the butt of the extended joke that Portnoy relates. For all his limitations, Portnoy does have the double consciousness to see that he is both the storyteller spinning out an elaborate joke and the protagonist laid low by its various punchlines. "This is my life, my only life," Portnoy says early on, "and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke — only it ain't no joke!"24

Meanwhile, as an editor of his own work, Roth seems to have exerted a kind of broad control of Portnoy's tone. He saw that the more toxic chunks of his own experience were a mismatch for Portnoy's tale. The false pregnancy scene, for instance, was "too malevolent for [the] kind of comedy" that Portnoy offered, he reflected in an interview.25 His most productive editorial intervention, arguably, was a formal one: to keep Alex bouncing between his present and his past, so as to imitate the flow of a mind that, in its hysterical pain, can't help but retreat back into its memories. Alex discovers himself, at the end of his narrative, "impaled again upon the long ago, what was, what will never be. . . . My endless childhood! Which I won't relinquish — or which won't relinquish me!"26

By scrambling the chronology of Alex's story once he becomes an adult, Roth conveys the complex endlessness of that "endless childhood." On the one hand, Alex is still enacting his adolescent mode of rebellion, his yakkety-yakking to his therapist a kind of expressive masturbation. On the other, he is yearning to recapture the beautiful, untroubled moments of his past — the softball games watching his father and the other Jewish men of the neighborhood; the eighth-grade field trip to the Essex County Court House, after which he committed to working on behalf of the downtrodden; and so on. As readers, we experience how stuck Alex is, how he writhes and how he wallows in his writhing. Whether we treasure the book or throw it across the room may depend on how we relate to that stuckness — to the comedy it delivers and the female characters who are its collateral damage, the other butt of its jokes.27

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In 1984, Roth was asked what he did with the hundreds of pages he drafted and discarded on the way to writing his finished novels. Did he save them up?

Roth answered peremptorily, "I generally prefer never to see them again."28

And yet he did save them up, donating them to the Library of Congress, where they could be seen again and again by people like myself. His papers were opened to the public in 2006, at which point he was still alive — in his mid-'70s and still to publish his last set of novels (Exit Ghost, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis). Perusing the drafts of Portnoy, I couldn't help but feel that there was something indecent in the act of scrutinizing these old typescript pages. Why had Roth allowed me to barge into his artistic workshop? Alex Portnoy had barred his mother from the family bathroom when she had insisted on inspecting his "poopie," but here Roth had unlocked the door and given me permission to inspect his literary leavings. (Even to take my time while doing so!) More than he cherished his privacy, it seems, Roth cherished how the novel, through its contrivances, allowed access to an imagined private life. He wanted scholars to be able to trace the history of his own contriving.

One final clue as to why Roth may have left his papers for all to see: he gave the first installment to the Library of Congress in 1969 — the same year Portnoy's Complaint was published. This is a novel that takes us into Alex's bathroom and many other intimate places besides; more broadly, it admits us into the mind of Alex, putting us in the place of a silent, discerning therapist whose greatest commitment, it appears, is to allow that mind to follow its own path. In that role of therapist, the reader is asked to play the opposite role of Alex's mother — to tolerate that which she would not, to refuse to divide the world into clean and unclean. This is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down in the liberatory spirit of the late-'60s. But given the poor results of Alex's politics of the putz, Spielvogel's model of "tolerance" is a problem, too — a point Roth underscored in his edits, which strand Alex in the crisis of his own making.

So we need to listen to Alex, yes, but we also need to speak up and challenge him, much more than Dr. Spielvogel does, if we want to untangle the problem he presents. Likewise with Roth's larger archive: it sits there, magnetic and vexing, flaunting the enigma of authorship, and ultimately demanding a more intense engagement.

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Scott Saul is a professor of English at UC-Berkeley and the author of Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, 2014).

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References