Thoughts on another classic about to turn 50 (no, it isn't me)

Yesterday, to Darcars in New Carrollton, Maryland to get the PT Cruiser serviced.

While waiting for the car, I re-visited a little classic, Goodbye, Columbus.

The older Philip Roth gets, the more he depresses me. I don’t think I even want to read his latest, Exit Ghost. But going back to this brilliant little allegro from his literary youth was something else altogether, a short bicycle ride down American literature’s memory lane to the time when Roth was one of his generation’s rising young stars, rather than the award-draped book factory he became later, turning out roughly a novel a year, or the curmudgeonly 74 year-old he is now, whose works I tend to avoid in the autumn because that’s when I tend to get depressed anyway, and everything he’s done, since the 1970s anyway, is so dark. From what I read, Exit Ghost sounds like some literary equivalent of Strauss’ Four Last Songs, or perhaps a better comparison might be Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet from his 1997 album Time Out Of Mind. In any case it doesn’t sound like something it would be healthy for me to read right now. (I think the last of Roth’s books I read was I Married A Communist, and I didn’t finish it.)

This year has been one for literary 50th anniversaries, (On The Road, The Alexandria Quartet) and more are coming: 2009 will mark the 50th year of Goodbye, Columbus, and the following year Rabbit, Run turns 50.

Interestingly, these last two remind me of each other, or I should say, re-reading Roth’s novella made me think of Updike’s first entry in the Harry Angstrom series. Both are so obviously of their time, and hence, quaint in 2007. Which doesn’t make either of them any less a masterpiece, but both were published very early in my life and give me a sharp perspective on what life in America was like about the time I was attending nursery school and kindergarten. It was still the brick-and-mortar world of the late industrial revolution: guys worked in factories, stores and libraries; their girlfriends’ fathers sold sinks and appliances. Their wives generally stayed home, did the ironing and watched The Edge of Night at three in the afternoon. No Internet, no cable television, no wireless anything unless you were talking about the walkie-talkies the Army used. Telephones were strictly rotary-dial, mail meant only what went into the metal box on your porch, and people still called the refrigerator “the icebox.”

But of course technology isn’t the only chasm between that world and this. While it’s not hard for me to fathom a world in which a 26 year-old guy feels constrained to put on a necktie and hold down a respectable job because he and his wife have just had a baby and that’s what responsibility demands, I can just barely brush elbows with a world in which two 23 year-old adults can’t casually sleep together without scandalizing the girl’s family; can’t even check into a hotel together without one of them putting on a fake wedding ring and the other signing the register “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” The 1960s and ‘70s sent that world to its grave, with Roth, Updike and a host of others liberated by the 1962 court decision lifting the ban on Tropic of Cancer acting as pallbearers in the funeral rites. Overnight, arguments in editorial meetings at book publishing firms about whether “fuck” should be rendered as “f***k” or “f—“ became as obsolete as the Negro Leagues became the week after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947. From now on the formerly forbidden word wouldn’t even have to be disguised. It would be honest, straightforward “fuck,” and a lot more. A whole lot more. By 1981, the year I turned 26, Jamie Hartshorn and I could openly live together out of wedlock and even have my parents come visit, which they did, for my 26th birthday in fact. I’m not saying there weren’t still a few rumblings of disapproval, chiefly from surviving members of the WWII generation like my Aunt Jessie, but there wasn’t very much they could do about it except mutter “shame on you;” the battle was won. (And my father, by the way, who was 67 in 1981, tut-tutted at Aunt Jessie for her Church Lady- primness: “Now, Jessie, young people these days don’t do things the way we did when we were kids...”)

It’s not even the combination of technology and the sexual revolution of the 1960s that creates a veritable Utah desert between the world of 1959 and that of 2007. Goodbye, Columbus was social satire that actually stung in 1959 — ten years before the uproar over Portnoy’s Complaint, it already had some sectors of the Jewish community expressing outrage at its unflattering treatment of upwardly-mobile Jews; Roth was already being called a “self-hating Jew.”

Old stuff. Jewish assimilation into the American mainstream, with its concomitant eddies and tides of snobbery running both ways, (gentile-on-Jew and Jew-on-Jew) was good for yuks in the late 1950s, but it’s not something anyone thinks too much about now. Nobody would write about the Patimkins and the Klugmans today, if only because Neil and Brenda are in their seventies now and their parents are long dead. Who really cares about such things anymore? The postwar era depicted by Roth, Saul Bellow and other Jewish writers who flourished around midcentury is gone. I’m talking about the era of serious young Jewish intellectuals who had enjoyed the benefit of college that their immigrant fathers had not, fighting cultural battles with bourgeois, sometimes nouveau-riche fathers and uncles who made their fortunes selling plumbing fixtures, light bulbs and zippers, who still used Yiddish syntax when speaking English, (“Tomorrow, don’t tell me tomorrow. Tomorrow the world could blow up”) killed themselves giving their children comfortable lives and then didn’t comprehend why their sons didn’t want to go into their fathers’ businesses with them. Didn’t comprehend why so many of them, like Goodbye’s Neil Klugman, who calls himself a “liver” as opposed to a “planner,” (“I’m a pancreas,” Brenda retorts) don’t seem to have much ambition, or at least much money ambition. Commerce was often the only profession open to the pre-war Jewish immigrants who hadn’t had the educational advantages they would insist upon for their children. It marked them of course, and all too often embarrassed their children, as parents have been doing since the first neanderthal father grunted “ogg” rather than the more fashionable “ogg-ogg” in front of his son. Ten years after Goodbye, Columbus, perhaps with his own father in mind, the author of Portnoy’s Complaint would generously, even gratefully, note the “self-annihilating” way that Jewish men of his father’s generation “gave themselves to their families,” and then take the compliment back with an every-bit-as-dated anecdote about Portnoy giving his father a gift subscription to the snooty-tooty Partisan Review, only to discover to his infuriated disgust that the old man isn’t even looking at it.

Just how truly gone that era is, was illustrated for me recently when I was reading an essay about yet another cultural artifact that just had its 50th birthday, West Side Story. I learned from this article that Jerome Robbins, years before he collaborated with Leonard Bernstein on the final product, had cooked up a New York-based adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, but had initially planned to call the show East Side Story, with the two rival street gangs depicted as Jews and Catholics rather than Puerto Ricans and Anglos. The author of the article observed drily that such a thing sounded "less like Romeo And Juliet and more like Abie's Irish Rose - The Musical." The transition to the west side of Manhattan, away from the older, pushcart world of European Jewish immigrants and into the more contemporary world of Puerto Rican immigrants, was judged fortunate, fortuitous, insightful…and canny. Abie’s Irish Rose was already very old hat by the time WWII broke out. The Latino-vs.-Anglo tensions of West Side Story are still with us.

But I was talking about the parallels, nay similarities, that I saw between Goodbye, Columbus and Rabbit, Run beyond the coincidence that they were published around the same time. Here’s an obvious one: they share the similar plot device of a youthful character, Ron Patimkin in Roth’s case, Harry Angstrom in Updike’s, who was a basketball star in school and now has to confront being an adult. The one-dimensional, dim-witted Patimkin, who is only a minor character in any case, cheerfully solves the problem by getting engaged and duly going into his father’s business, something a more thoughtful young man such as the story’s narrator would never do without at least agonizing over it first. How big a dope is Ron Patimkin? Roth makes a point of having Ron’s father, Ben Patimkin, shake his head and express profanity-seasoned disbelief that a boy so adroit on the basketball court could be so inept at managing a crew of black employees unloading porcelain sinks from a truck.

In Updike’s novel of course, the I-was-a-star-on-the-basketball team thing is the core element in Harry’s interior crisis. In high school he was a genuine star; now he’s just another twentysomething guy who had to marry his girlfriend because he knocked her up, (another quaintness from our perspective) and is thus forced to settle down, get a job and become an adult. That he isn’t at all sure how he feels about that is one of the themes that will run through not only Rabbit, Run but the three-novels-plus-a-coda that would continue its story over the next four decades. In other words, Harry Angstrom is the conflict-ridden character that Ronald Patimkin would have been had he been anything but a happy moron.

Well, here’s my coda: Roth's Neil Klugman and his negligible Ron Patimkin, as well as Updike’s Harry Angstrom, were highly relevant figures to their generation and even to mine. We baby boomers, so vilified for the past decade and a half, were still to some degree and according to our lights trying to come to grips with the necessity of becoming grownups. We didn't, and still don't, want to get old, but we were willing to start careers, get married, have children and struggle with trying to be responsible adults, even if our collective memory of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show prompted us a generation ago to force Detroit (through our sheer numbers) to invent the SUV because we didn't want to drive the station wagons our parents drove, and even if, at this late date as AARP begins to absorb us, we are trying to come up with another term to replace "senior citizen." Today’s twentysomethings aren't having such dark moments of the soul — most of them are still living with their parents and have no plans to leave anytime soon. “30 is the new 20” is what we’re hearing now.

God, I wish that had been true 22 years ago. Because "50 is the new 30" doesn't help much. Do you mean to tell me I could have stayed in my parents’ granny flat in California for a few more years? That instead of joining the Foreign Service in 1985 and going off to see the world, I could have stayed close to our next-door neighbors the Van Nostrands, who by the way had been our next-door neighbors since I was a baby, and had a basketball hoop over their garage door? You might have seen me, aged 29, over there at sunset on an October night, shooting some hoops. But I was working by then, as I had been for years already. Still, pushing 30, trying to grow up. Like Neil, wanting to be a liver, not a planner, and yet still aware that to be pushing 30 meant that Shakespeare's admonition "to thine own self be true" was acquiring a new urgency. And by the way, I was born on Columbus Day, 1955. Goodbye, Columbus.