Fear of death
Paul Ableman
The Professor of Desire Philip Roth (Cape £4.50) This may well be Philip Roth's most serious novel. I can't be sure because I have not read them all. But humour, varying from the fizzing hilarity of Portnoy's Complaint to the political satire of Our Gang, seems always to have been the dominant note. It is not in The Professor of Desire although the book is frequently witty and has several very funny passages. Essentially, however, the mood here is elegiac and even pessimistic. Sex, which, in the earlier books, generated farce, is now seen to be equally the matrix of pain. The narrator, when his desire for his 'good shikse' begins to wane, muses: 'Only an interim. . . and as though I have in fact been stabbed and the strength is gushing out of me, I feel myself about to tumble from my chair ... never to know anything durable.'
This book belongs in that essentially Ameritan sub-class of fiction which I have hitherto always thought of as 'meditations'. However, Roth himself supplies a more exact description of the genre when his hero, considering Chekhov's short stories, calls them 'anecdotal ruminations'. The Professor of Desire is an 'anecdotal rumination' and a distinguished one. This is a fruitful form that operates somewhere on the frontier between fact and fiction, with Saul Bellow the premier exponent on the fictional side and such writers as James Baldwin and Norman Mailer dominating the factual. The focus of interest in these works lies not in plot and character but in what the contemplating mind makes of experience. Consciousness itself can be considered the hero. Such books tend to be low on narrative drive but rich in quirky incident and original perspective. While leaning heavily on the rhetorical question, they also attract epigram in response to the brooding mind's striving for a firm grasp on its own reality. They often include letters and journals since these are natural complements of the process of reflection.
The Professor of Desire, like Portnoy's Complaint, is narrated in the present tense. But whereas, in the earlier book, the style gyrated wildly to accommodate the erupting memories of the narrator, in the present work it has been soberly conventionalised. Nevertheless, in this book too, Roth's skill in endowing his continuous present with suppleness means that the mannerism never becomes obtrusive.
David Kepesh, Roth's narrator, is brought up in his father's resplendently named Hungarian Royale Hotel, a Jewish resort in the Catskill Mountains. Later he studies at Syracuse University and wins a Fulbright scholarship to London, where he seduces two Swedish girls. One is gentle and loving and throws herself under a truck (happily surviving) after David has induced her to participate in threesome romps with himself and the other girl, a sexual adventuress. At the end of his scholarship year, David leaves Europe. He never sees either girl again but they have already neatly defined the poles of his eroticism and, in a sense, he continues to replay the same scenario. After a disastrous marriage to an adventuress, Kepesh, by way of the analyst's couch, wins through to find another gentle, but passionate, girl. The narrative leaves him poised for yet another swing of the pendulum.
This oscillation of desire is, of course, far from uncommon and the most surprising aspect of Kepesh's always pertinent, selfcritical and occasionally profound musing on his condition is that it never seems to occur to him that other men may share it. He is an egotist, infinitely sensitive to the least stir of his own psyche and relatively indifferent to the inner being of others. The most serious consequence of his selfabsorption, from a literary point of view, is that his narrative is sometimes perfunctory and almost always impressionistic. Occassionally a molecule of time swims into sharp focus but generally external reality is seen only through interstices in Kepesh's interior monologue.
Kepesh becomes a professor of — no, not desire but English Literature. The tension that energises the book derives from the tug-of-war between the id-monster side of him that wants to wallow in polymorphous perversity and the civilised book-lover who yearns to be husband, father, teacher — in short, a mensch. Oddly enough, while Kepesh himself seems persuaded that the dangerous instinctual man has the upper hand, the narrative convincingly testifies to the essential dominance of the professor. None of the erotic passages is as convincing, or as deeply-felt, as the subtle accounts of the delights of teaching or the elegant and accurate exegeses of works by Chekhov, Colette, Flaubert and others. The two strands come together in the most telling passage in the book. On a trip to Prague, Kepesh dreams that he meets the ancient lady who was once Kafka's whore. In his dream, surreal, erotic extravagance and objective scholarly concern fuse into splendid black comedy that bears comparison with the most marvellous example of the genre in modern literature, the shooting of Clare Quilty in Lolita.
This is undoubtedly a fine and rewarding novel. In the last analysis, however, Roth is perhaps too much of an instinctive humorist to do full jt.stice to the darker side of his message which is made explicit in an essay on Chekhov written, supposedly, by one of Professor Kepesh's students: 'We are born innocent. We suffer terrible disillusionment before we can gain knowledge, and then we fear death — and we are granted only fragmentary happiness to offset the pain.'
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Housespy Maureen Duffy (Harnisil Hamilton £4.50) Cesar and Augusta Ronald Harwood (Sacker £4.50) One Interior Day Ronald Harwood (Secker £3.50)
It is a pleasure for the jaded reviewer to be carried along from time to time by the professional ease of established writers trying their hands at new modes. YO8 know that even if they don't quite bring it off, they are never actually going t° plunge humiliatingly into the safety net' Like James Hunt wielding a crossbow 011 Superstars, Maureen Duffy makes a verY creditable and stylish shot at the PO' chological spy thriller in Housespy. Increasingly, this format is being used by writers to explore uncertainties and, complexities. Miss Duffy weaves a tangle° web around the character of Scully, a,.11, exceptionally literate cop who is taken On his patch in South London to guard Old field, Minister of Economic Planning. The plot (and, more confusingly, the punctuation) is elliptic and racy, moving fru° lovingly documented London and stockbroker-belt, through Paris, Amsterdam, New England. It is not the best thriller ever, but it is quite beautifully written, with a sensitivity to atmosphere and place. Hollywood history prize this week gees to Ronald Harwood who has produced real oddity: the story of the relationshi between Cesar Franck and the beautiful Irish singer, Augusta Holmes, written, as it were, from the cuttings. Did they evert or didn't they? one asks right until the end. Well I'm not going to tell you. Read the book as an interesting account of the French musical scene at the end of the nineteeth century but be warned that it plods from the heavy to the hilarious: Franck and Chabrier meet on the street: 'Terrible about Bizet. Only thirty-sig. And so sudden'. Fetch that safety net. On the other hand, Franck's tortured dedication to his music, the unleashing of his final flood of passionate writing as well 85 the fascinating character of Augusta her self, are competently done. But it's writ" ing by numbers, however efficient. Far more accomplished are the same author's short stories of the world he really knows: the film business. As a distinguished film writer he fias inside know' ledge of the characters and situations he describes, and his touch is absolutelY assured and true. His ear for speech Pati tern — especially the fractured English ° Italians and international entrepreneurs and his real feeling for the casualties 01 the slide area, are exemplary. There is a. moving account of an old homosexual producer, endlessly trying to 'introduce, his newest protégés. Unlike Cesar an Augusta, this is the real thing.
Mary Hope
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