THE CRIME OF LITERARY VENGEANCE

Then how come I know? I know, of course, because Philip Roth broke his promise to his father. He wrote about the sad befouling incident, including his promise not to tell a soul. He wrote about it because it was, as they say in the trade, good copy, rich material. He broke his promise — a fairly sacred promise, one might have thought — because he is a writer. And writers, let there be no mistake, aren’t quite human.

Those who live by the sword, the Bible reports, die by the sword. For writers, change “sword” to “word.” In classical and Elizabethan drama, vengeance was a major subject and a great theme. As we move closer to our time, vengeance becomes less an action of the characters in plays and novels and more a part of the psychological motive behind the works themselves. Consider, for a moment, the following paragraph from the introduction to Conceived in Malice by Louise DeSalvo, a study of literary vengeance in works by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller:

Every biography and autobiography I read while working on this project described revenge operating as an important motive in the creation of a literary work, and it seems a nearly universal phenomenon in the lives of writers. Richard Aidington, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, Anthony West, Anais Nin, Violet Trefusis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Roy Campbell, Christina Stead, Antonia White, Colley Cibber, Alexander Pope, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the prime minister turned novelist Benjamin Disraeli, Henry Gauthier Villars, Colette, John Cheever, Mary Cheever, Jean Rhys, H. H. Munro (“Saki”), Ford Madox Ford, Violet Hunt, Henry Fielding, Bernard DeVoto, Marcel Proust, Anne Sexton, Gustave Flaubert, Nathaniel Hawthorne — all wrote one or more literary works to take revenge.

In a case of the victimizer victimized, Philip Roth has now been the target of a notable act of vengeance. He himself dropped lots of people from so- called real life into his novels — a whole cast of University of Chicago characters appears in Letting Go, and his first wife, who committed suicide, takes a pretty good clubbing in more than one of his books. Meanwhile, he has been used as a character in at least one novel I know, Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies. There, it must be said, he gets off fairly easily. He is given the name Jack and is the lover of the young married narrator, who of him remarks: “I was anomalous in his life, amusing as long as I didn’t step or make him step out of his range of comfort.” The Roth character is cautious, selfish, manipulative, a bit of a rat if the truth be told, but what the hell, it’s a big city out there.

No one is likely to say that Philip Roth gets off fairly easily in Leaving a Doll’s House, the memoir of the second Mrs. Roth, the English actress Claire Bloom. “I hope he’ll understand that it’s a book about a wonderful man,” the author told a reporter from New York. “A remarkable, brilliant man with whom I was very fortunate to live all those years. I wouldn’t have missed those years for the world.” My guess is that, after the appearance of this book, as deliberate an act of literary vengeance as one is likely to find, Roth would be delighted to have missed those years — would be pleased to trade them in for the equivalent in hard time at Leavenworth.

Miss Bloom takes the aging boy novelist, as they used to say at my old racquetball club, on tour. His self-protectiveness, in her version, comes to seem not merely introverted, or even anti-social, but mean, small-hearted, really quite vicious. “Philip,” she reports, “always gained the upper-hand in any argument. . . . There was a deep ambivalence in Philip toward full commitment. . . . He would do things only his way, and do them as and when he wished.”

Machiavelli wrote The Prince, but Claire Bloom appears to have been married to one, from whom she now wishes to extract vengeance. People used to talk a good deal about the Jewish American Princess, but insufficient attention has been paid to the Jewish American Prince, a greatly pampered boy used to tidiness in every department of his life: physical, emotional, spiritual. Roth has always seemed very much the type of this Prince. The Jewish American Prince is a man who likes his boxer shorts ironed, his meals warm with no one food running into another, his sex completely at the service of his fantasies. Meticulous in his person, he tends to have a dirty mind, and a dirty mind, as La Rochefoucauld reminds us, never sleeps. (Please not to inquire how I happen to know this.) All this nuttiness can be fairly amusing, I suppose, but I don’t recommend living with it every day, especially if, to Jewish American Princely qualities, one adds the deeper madness of being a certain kind of artist. Maurice Ravel, a lifelong bachelor, recommended that artists not marry. No dope, Maurice Ravel.

In Leaving a Doll’s House we are, of course, getting only one side of the story. It is, to be sure, a pretty damning side. It provides a sad portrait of Philip Roth in utter vulnerability during serious nervous breakdowns. Roth, it will surprise no one to learn, is a long-time psychoanalysand. When his and Claire Bloom’s courtship begins, in 1976, he is on his way to his shrink, she to have tea with her yoga teacher. “Philip, you are insane, I am not,” she tells him at one point in their disputations. In her book, she reports him as suicidal, shows him in extremis, devastated by depression, holed up in an expensive booby hatch. “Philip disintegrated before my eyes into a disoriented, terrified infant.” When she has finished with him, she says he has the life he wants: “the life of a bitter, lonely, aging ascetic with no human ties.”

The truly crushing case against Roth in his former wife’s memoir is found in his treatment of his step-daughter. He, poor Prince, found this adolescent “boring” and disruptive, both of his need for quiet and of his requirement of all her mother’s concentrated attentions. Roth ordered Claire Bloom to send her 18-year-old daughter away, and, as she miserably confesses, she agreed to do so. It is at this turn in the book that we begin to understand that, in Miss Bloom, we are dealing with a pretty shaky and sadly flaky character in her own right. Earlier in her memoir she tells us about her previous love affairs and marriages — most notable in the former category, Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, and (a one-night stand) Anthony Quinn; in the latter, the actor Rod Steiger and Hillard Elkins, the producer of Oh! Calcutta! — all of which serves to establish that she is a woman stimulated by unworthiness in men.

After fifteen years of living together, when Miss Bloom asked Roth to marry her, he in turn asked her to sign a pre-nuptial agreement that had her entering the marriage in a condition of almost perfect vulnerability. Only later, long after the fact, was his monstrosity revealed, when Miss Bloom learned that Roth had made an earnest play for one of his stepdaughter’s girlfriends. What caused Roth to do such a thing, apart from the writer’s need for inquietude, is difficult to say. But Miss Bloom is persuasive on the truth of her charge.

In Roth’s novel Deception, not one of his distinct successes, the hero’s wife is named Claire — or at least was until Miss Bloom insisted he change it. She is shown, in the novel, as an actress and, in Miss Bloom’s words, a “remarkably uninteresting, middle-aged wife, who, as described, is nothing better than an ever-spouting fountain of tears, constantly bemoaning the fact that his [her husband’s] other women are so young.”

Miss Bloom’s final case against Philip Roth is that he is, not so deep down as all that, a woman-hater. He is a manipulator with a larger agenda, at the top of which is his desire — make that, in his exwife’s view, his “need” — to wound and humiliate women, who he feels will otherwise dominate and somehow violate his integrity, indeed his very being. A pretty sick kid, in short. Sad if true, I suppose, is the best one can say about so strong and conveniently feminist a view from so implicated a party as the former second Mrs. Roth.

At her book’s end, Claire Bloom is on her own again, in possession of a very small settlement (that damn pre-nuptial agreement!) and large malice toward the man who so badly misused her, though she has been giving interviews that suggest that deeper down she continues to have strong feelings for our man, the Prince. This book, in which she is able to make such public show of her anger and scores so many points against the man who she feels betrayed her, ought to have left her in good mental fettle. Nothing repressed, the shrinks hold, everything gained.

Yet one wonders, vengeance being at least a two-handed game, if she has heard the last from Philip Roth. The only thing she doesn’t take up about their marriage in Leaving a Doll’s House is her and Roth’s sex life. She remarks that without her second husband, Elkins, “the dark part of my sexual nature would never have come into being,” though she spares us the details. Her account of her life with Roth is similarly bereft of the details of sex; no accounts here of impotence, of non-Euclidian demands, or of anyone’s having to sleep with a teddy bear. Perhaps this will be dealt with by Roth in a blistering return volley, probably in the form of a novel. One anticipates corpses strewn all over the joint.

Third parties have already intruded. In her memoir, Miss Bloom tells of Gore Vidal instructing her, after her second marriage, to steer clear of Roth: “You have already had Portnoy’s complaint [her second husband, the effable Elkins]. Do not involve yourself with Portnoy.” And now Mr. Vidal has supplied Claire Bloom with a handsome blurb for her book, the final sentence of which reads: “Now, with an eye as coldly fixed upon her own self as it is upon lovers and husbands, she records in a terse tell-all style of such candor that she even makes — inadvertently — her last husband, Philip Roth, into something he himself has failed to do — not for want of trying — interesting at last.”

I should not like to gain a reputation for saying kind things about Gore Vidal, but he, unlike most literary men and women, is at least up- and out-in- front with his vitriol. He insults people directly. His exchanges with Truman Capote were wildly amusing, and he continues to make jokes over the latter’s dead body. So natural is the spirit of put-down to Vidal that he can scarcely avoid insulting even people who are dear to him; I think, in this connection, of his accounts of Tennessee Williams. But all this, as I say, he does out in the open: In interviews, on television chat shows, in the middle of book reviews and essays, he finds time to shoot in a little jab, always nicely aimed below the belt.

Not all attempts to exact literary vengeance are made behind the arras of fiction. A splendidly egregious example of literary attack that has a nice feel of vengeance behind it occurred only a month or so ago when, in the October issue of Boston Magazine, Alexander Theroux blasted his younger brother, the novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux. The occasion for the attack was the publication of Paul Theroux’s My Other Life, a post-modern, deliberately half-fraudulent series of autobiographical stories. It is therefore possible that the older brother’s attack is a put-on, a family conspiracy — though I rather doubt it. Certainly, there is nothing impersonal about this attack. “He [Paul Theroux] has bowel worries and eats prunes for breakfast and once made inquiries to me about platform shoes,” writes brother Alex. “No one I have ever met in my life is a worse, almost pathologically unsympathetic listener.” When Cain slew Abel, at least only God was watching, not all of Boston.

The older Theroux brother’s case against the younger is that he is cowardly, pretentious, self-promoting — a jerk to the highest power. “We in the family,” writes Alexander Theroux, “don’t mind his affected gentility, his smug and self-important airs, his urgent starf–ing insistence that he’s a friend of lords and ladies, and only laugh at the fame he courts, the self- aggrandizement, inviting celebrities like Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumbel to his house, neither of whom, I believe, has ever quite managed to make it.” On Alexander T.’s bill of complaint is the merciless way that Paul T., with his own strong taste for vengeance, “has satirized our brother Joseph, caricatured our Mom and Dad, and rehearsed again and again the details of his divorce, which we are all of us tired of hearing about.”

Paul Theroux’s method is closer to standard literary procedure, which is to settle scores behind the disguise of characters in novels and in poems. There are some earlier precedents for this, but it really gets going at high pitch in the eighteenth century. Low birth, reputed loss of virtue, uncleanliness, bad skin — nothing was ruled out in the skirmishes between such figures as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague. The latter once wrote, apropos of Pope and Swift, that “these two superior Beings were entitled by their Birth and hereditary fortune to be only a couple of Link Boys,” or servants who hold up lanterns so one can pass along a dark street. Pope accused Lady Mary of being personally filthy, having a venereal disease, and being a whore. His entire brilliant career sometimes seems as if it floated on pure malice, his relentlessly perfect heroic couplets one long payback for injuries felt and imagined.

All but the saintly or the very dull have known the desire for vengeance, but the literary, with their greater skill with words and hence at formulating insults, are especially well situated to exact it through the pen. Wordsworth thought poetry “emotion recollected in tranquillity”; vengeance is emotion recollected in hostility. If, as the Sicilians say, vengeance is a dish best served cold, writers prefer it in an inky sauce.

So endemic is the taste for vengeance in the contemporary literary world that it has driven the editors of the New York Times Book Review to a fine, pervasive paranoia. When assigning books to review, they brood about the possibility of reviewers having secret motives, hidden agendas, God knows what. Only a few weeks ago, it was reported that the reviewer who blasted Scott Turow’s most recent novel in the Book Review may have done so because she is helping Marcia Clark write her book about the O. J. Simpson trial, and Turow has been highly critical of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office’s conduct of the trial.

Exacting vengeance through their writing may be the closest to power that writers are permitted to feel. Vladimir Nabokov’s character, the novelist Sebastian Knight, in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, explains something of this thrill of power in a letter to his publisher, who is worried about a libel suit because of the novelist’s portrait of a character based on the life of another writer. “There are in fact not many things in life comparable to the delight of satire,” Sebastian writes, “and when I imagine the humbug’s face as he reads (and read he shall) that particular passage and knows as we all do that it is the truth, then delight reaches its sweetest climax.”

Dostoyevsky’s portrait of Turgenev as the foppish liberal writer in The Devils is a stunning example of using fiction to slay enemies, in this instance a political enemy. Dostoyevsky allows no mercy for Karmazinov, the character based on Turgenev, who first appears “wearing a little quilted jerkin, a sort of jacket, with little mother-of-pearl buttons, but much too short, and which was not at all becoming to his rather well-fed tummy and the solidly rounded beginnings of his legs; but tastes vary.” The Turgenev character lisps and mumbles, prances and preens, utters only idiotic opinions. Even when making a considerable jackass of himself, “his face simply said: ‘I’m not the way you think, I’m for you, only praise me, praise me more, as much as possible, I like it terribly. . . .’

Literary vengeance is a subset of the larger practice of writers modeling their characters from life. In the twentieth century the practice has spread. Conrad used a great many characters in his novels and stories drawn from his experiences aboard ships in the East. James Joyce inserted Oliver St. John Gogarty, the physician and garrulous manabout-Dublin, into Ulysses as Buck Mulligan, and Joyce’s estate was being sued for libel by the Dodd family as late as the 1950s. Noel Coward stung Somerset Maugham with his portrait of a writer of fading talent in his play A Song at Twilight, but then Maugham had done an even better job, in Cakes and Ale, on the English novelist and man of letters Hugh Walpole. In literary vengeance, one hand not so much washes as stabs the other.

Evelyn Waugh used his fiction to mock W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender for not fighting during World War II and, in the same trilogy, Sword of Honor, stuck several darts into Cyril Connolly. So deep ran the free-floating malice in Waugh that he didn’t even require the motive of vengeance to display his skill in this line; when Brendan Bracken used his connections in the Churchill government to pull strings to get Waugh a three-month leave from the British army to write Brideshead Revisited, Waugh repaid him by drawing a comic portrait of him in the novel as the oafish Rex Mottram. Kingsley Amis regularly used fiction to knock down enemies and settle old scores.

Americans have not exactly refrained from this game. Hemingway wrote spitefully — and anti-Semitically — about Harold Loeb in The Sun Also Rises; and in A Moveable Feast, a work of non-fiction, he took out after F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and just about everyone else who ever helped him. Mary McCarthy, a specialist in the malicious, seemed unable to write about any except actual people, not least her second husband, Edmund Wilson, in A Charmed Life. All the characters in The Group, her novel about her circle at Vassar, are similarly readily identifiable, and every one of them felt injured. But then Randall Jarrell drew a devastating portrait of Mary McCarthy in his one novel, Pictures from an Institution. Closer to our own day, in a fine act of literary vengeance, Nora Ephron in her novel Heartburn blew away her exhusband Carl Bernstein and the English lady-friend with whom he presumably cheated on her. This list could be greatly extended.

But Henry James would not appear on it. Like almost every other writer, James drew from life — in The Bostonians rather directly so — but revenge was never a part of his modus operandi. On the contrary, he felt that anything like the malice that powers vengeance ought to be strained and thoroughly drained out of any writing that wished to make claim to being artistic. He once warned Vernon Lee (the novelist whose real name was Violet Paget) that she wrote “too much in a moral passion,” adding the excellent aesthetic advice: “Cool first — write afterwards. Morality is hot but art is icy!”

Several years later, Miss Lee satirized Henry James himself in a story titled “Lady Tal,” through a character she named Jervase Marion and described as “a psychological novelist” and “an intimate of the world of Henry James and a kind of Henry James.” James claimed never to have read the story but thought she had committed an act of “treachery to private relations.” He wrote: “But I will not see her again. She has committed two crimes. She has invaded my privacy and she has put a human being into a novel without re- imagining him.” Two sins, one personal, the other aesthetic, and both weighed heavily with James.

The crucial distinction about using actual people in fiction, plays, or other literary forms is between whether or not active malice has gone into the creation. Nailing someone through literature is almost always a mean, snivelling, quite vicious act. My dearest friend, the late Edward Shils, once was the target for vengeance in an essay in which he was given another name and where his writing was described as “dry as dust” and he is portrayed yelling impatiently at his aged and nearly deaf mother. Behind this act, I knew, was Edward’s treating the author of the essay coldly; it may well be that harsh remarks he had made had got back to her. But he never forgot this act of vengeance against him and referred to it, as Henry James may have done, as “monstrous.”

I recall mentioning this act to Saul Bellow, who knew all the dramatis personae, and he agreed that the malice quotient was very high. But, then, he wondered what the author eventually had in store for him — something much worse, he was sure. Bellow has himself used people from real life in all his fiction; there are people who say that he has re-imagined nothing, that nearly every character in every one of his novels and stories has a real-life analogue. I have known a few among them. Some have been treated kindly; others have been blown away.

But people who live in bone houses shouldn’t eat ribs. I have published precisely seventeen short stories, and in them I have used a number of characters taken from life. In almost all cases, I hope, I have re-imagined these characters, but some, I confess, have been more imaginatively altered than others. The second-best arrangement is when one can insert a character in a story who is based on someone one loves or admires. Best of all is when one wholly invents a character, though there are some people who claim that writers invent nothing.

Sometimes real-life characters are so grand, so astonishingly fit for being put into fiction that one feels they were sent over by central casting. I once wrote a story about a black con man I had met in the Army who needed no touching up, and therefore I put him into a story I wrote without the aid of even a make-up man, changing only his name, confident in my snobbish — and, as it turned out, correct — assumption that he would never read the story. Coming upon characters in real life so vivid might seem a great advantage, but in fact it can have its drawbacks. Such characters write themselves, they inhibit invention, they rein in the imagination — they are less a good deal than one might think.

But for all that I have borrowed from life, on only one occasion that I know have I written a story that had vengeance as one of its motives. (“No motive,” the novelist John Gardner noted, “is too low for art.”) It is a story titled “Another Rare Visit with Noah Danzig.” A great many people who read it seemed to recognize straightaway the writer upon whom my character Noah Danzig was based — so many in fact that, when I was asked about his real-life model on a National Public Radio interview show, I said that he was based on a combination of Kareem Abdul Jabbar and David Ben Gurion. The joke didn’t go over there, either.

In this story I deliberately set out to mock the pretensions of a famous American writer who was always complaining, in the midst of what seemed to me an unremitting flow of prizes and rewards, about the writer in America being ignored; about the vulgarity of contemporary publicity, in which he himself indulged rather extravagantly; and about the instability of modern private life when his own was an impressive, and so far as I could see largely self- created, mess. Added to the piquancy of all this — and here the unpleasant motive of vengeance creeps in — he and I had had a falling out, owing to what I felt was an act of frivolous disloyalty on his part. My story was in part designed, not to put too fine a point on it, to pay the old boy back.

Of course, literary vengeance, like public confession, can only be of interest if the person upon whom the vengeance is being wreaked is deemed worth the world’s notice. When someone told Noel Coward, late in his life, that the drama critic T. C. Worsley had “come out” in his memoirs, Coward retorted: “There is one essential difference between me and Cuthbert Worsley. The British public at large would not care if Cuthbert Worsely had slept with mice.” Nor is the world much likely to care if a writer, in one of his stories, draws a harsh portrait of his Uncle Louie, who owned the two shoe stores in Brooklyn.

The model for my character Noah Danzig, however, is someone about whom the world has decided to be interested. And such reclame as the story, at the time it was published, was able to garner was, I fear, due more to his fame than to my ability as a writer of stories. Is it a good story? I think that it is at least an amusing one. But would it be as amusing if not so clearly based on a living and notable person? I shall probably never know. And here perhaps is the penalty of allowing vengeance to get in the way of literature: It tends to leave a stain that doesn’t quite ever wash out.

Henry James is once again the best guide. Writing about the Journal of the Goncourt brothers, a work characterized by the authors’ annoyance with much of the world that came under their inspection, “mainly a record of resentment and suffering,” James reminds us that “art is most in character when it shows itself most amiable” and “it is not amiable when it is narrow and exclusive and jealous” — and, one might add, vengeful. An act of vengeance is finally the return of a betrayal by a betrayal. Nothing much can come of this transaction, even when conducted under the flag of literature, except perhaps titillation for a small circle of readers who fancy themselves cognoscenti and a wound or two to the targeted parties. Vengeance in literature chiefly proves not that the pen is mightier than the sword, but merely that it can be a lot more irritating.

By Joseph Epstein