Philip Roth - The Human Stain

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Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk — formerly “Silky Silk,” undefeated welterweight pro boxer — strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and pissed off so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they've all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls “the Devil of the Little Place — the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies.”
But shocking, intensely dramatized events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, “Do they exist or are they spooks?” They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into “the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication,” and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibility, “the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble,” and a melancholy voluptuousness. “I'm back in the tornado,” Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it — and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux.
In a short space, it's tough to convey the gale-force quality of Silk's rants, or the odd effect of Zuckerman's narration, alternately retrospective and torrentially in the moment. The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey are just as important as his turbulent forced retirement, because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is a black man. (If this seems implausible, consider that the famous New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard did the same thing.) Young Silk rejects both the racism that bars him from Woolworth's counter and the Negro solidarity of Howard University. “Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard” is for Coleman Silk. “Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery — that was the punch to the labonz.... Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?”
Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband (a sketchy guy who seems to have wandered in from a lesser Russell Banks novel), scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of minor characters pop in, mouth off, kick ass, and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain.

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“What undid her?”

“A stepfather undid her. Upper-bourgeois evil undid her. There was a divorce when she was five. The prosperous father caught the beautiful mother having an affair. The mother liked money, remarried money, and the rich stepfather wouldn't leave Faunia alone. Fondling her from the day he arrived. Couldn't stay away from her. This blond angelic child, fondling her, fingering her — it's when he tried fucking her that she ran away. She was fourteen. The mother refused to believe her. They took her to a psychiatrist. Faunia told the psychiatrist what happened, and after ten sessions the psychiatrist too sided with the stepfather. ‘Takes the side of those who pay him,’ Faunia says. ‘Just like everyone.’ The mother had an affair with the psychiatrist afterward. That is the story, as she reports it, of what launched her into the life of a tough having to make her way on her own. Ran away from home, from high school, went down south, worked there, came back up this way, got whatever work she could, and at twenty married this farmer, older than herself, a dairy farmer, a Vietnam vet, thinking that if they worked hard and raised kids and made the farm work she could have a stable, ordinary life, even if the guy was on the dumb side. Especially if he was on the dumb side. She thought she might be better off being the one with the brains. She thought that was her advantage. She was wrong. All they had together was trouble. The farm failed. ‘Jerk-off,’ she tells me, ‘bought one tractor too many.’ And regularly beat her up. Beat her black and blue. You know what she presents as the high point of the marriage? The event she calls ‘the great warm shit fight.’ One evening they are in the barn after the milking arguing about something, and a cow next to her takes a big shit, and Faunia picks up a handful and flings it in Lester's face. He flings a handful back, and that's how it started. She said to me, ‘The warm shit fight may have been the best time we had together.’ At the end, they were covered with cow shit and roaring with laughter, and, after washing off with the hose in the barn, they went up to the house to fuck. But that was carrying a good thing too far. That wasn't one-hundredth of the fun of the fight. Fucking Lester wasn't ever fun — according to Faunia, he didn't know how to do it. ‘Too dumb even to fuck right.’ When she tells me that I am the perfect man, I tell her that I see how that might seem so to her, coming to me after him.”

“And fighting the Lesters of life with warm shit since she's fourteen has made her what at thirty-four,” I asked, “aside from savagely wise? Tough? Shrewd? Enraged? Crazy?”

“The fighting life has made her tough, certainly sexually tough, but it hasn't made her crazy. At least I don't think so yet. Enraged? If it's there — and why wouldn't it be?—it's a furtive rage. Rage without the rage. And, for someone who seems to have lived entirely without luck, there's no lament in her — none she shows to me, anyway. But as for shrewd, no. She says things sometimes that sound shrewd. She says, ‘Maybe you ought to think of me as a companion of equal age who happens to look younger. I think that's where I'm at.’ When I asked, ‘What do you want from me?’ she said, ‘Some companionship. Maybe some knowledge. Sex. Pleasure. Don't worry. That's it.’ When I told her once she was wise beyond her years, she told me, ‘I'm dumb beyond my years.’ She was sure smarter than Lester, but shrewd? No. Something in Faunia is permanently fourteen and as far as you can get from shrewd. She had an affair with her boss, the guy who hired her. Smoky Hollenbeck. I hired him —guy who runs the college's physical plant. Smoky used to be a football star here. Back in the seventies I knew him as a student. Now he's a civil engineer. He hires Faunia for the custodial staff, and even while he's hiring her, she understands what's on his mind. The guy is attracted to her. He's locked into an unexciting marriage, but he's not angry with her about it — he's not looking at her disdainfully, thinking, Why haven't you settled down, why are you still tramping and whoring around? No bourgeois superiority from Smoky. Smoky is doing all the right things and doing them beautifully — a wife, kids, five kids, married as a man can be, a sports hero still around the college, popular and admired in town — but he has a gift: he can also step outside of that. You wouldn't believe it to talk to him. Mr. Athena Square squared, performing in every single way he is supposed to perform. Appears to have bought into the story of himself one hundred percent. You would expect him to think, This stupid bitch with her fucked-up life? Get her the fuck out of my office. But he doesn't. Unlike everyone else in Athena, he is not so caught up in the legend of Smoky that he is incapable of thinking, Yeah, this is a real cunt I'd like to fuck. Or incapable of acting. He fucks her, Nathan. Gets Faunia in bed with him and another of the women from the custodial staff. Fucks 'em together. Goes on for six months. Then a real estate woman, newly divorced, fresh on the local scene, she joins the act. Smoky's circus. Smoky's secret three-ring circus. But then, after six months, he drops her — takes Faunia out of the rotation and drops her. I knew nothing about any of this till she told me. And she only told me because one night in bed, her eyes roll back into her head and she calls me by his name. Whispers to me, ‘Smoky.’ On top of old Smoky. Her being with him in that ménage gave me a better idea of the dame I was dealing with. Upped the ante. Gave me a jolt, actually — this is no amateur. When I ask her how Smoky manages to attract his hordes, she tells me, ‘By the force of his prick.’ ‘Explain,’ I say, and she tells me, ‘You know how when a real cunt walks into a room, a man knows it? Well, the same thing happens the other way round. With certain people, no matter what the disguise, you understand what they're there to do.’ In bed is the only place where Faunia is in any way shrewd, Nathan. A spontaneous physical shrewdness plays the leading role in bed — second lead played by transgressive audacity. In bed nothing escapes Faunia's attention. Her flesh has eyes. Her flesh sees everything. In bed she is a powerful, coherent, unified being whose pleasure is in overstepping the boundaries. In bed she is a deep phenomenon. Maybe that's a gift of the molestation. When we go downstairs to the kitchen, when I scramble some eggs and we sit there eating together, she's a kid. Maybe that's a gift of the molestation too. I am in the company of a blank-eyed, distracted, incoherent kid. This happens nowhere else. But whenever we eat, there it is: me and my kid. Seems to be all the daughter that's left in her. She can't sit up straight in her chair, she can't string two sentences together having anything to do with each other. All the seeming nonchalance about sex and tragedy, all of that disappears, and I'm sitting there wanting to say to her, ‘Pull yourself up to the table, get the sleeve of my bathrobe out of your plate, try to listen to what I'm saying, and look at me, damn it, when you speak.’”

Do you say it?”

“Doesn't seem advisable. No, I don't — not as long as I prefer to preserve the intensity of what is there. I think of that canister under her bed, where she keeps the ashes she doesn't know what to do with, and I want to say, ‘It's two years. It's time to bury them. If you can't put them in the ground, then go down to the river and shake out the ashes from the bridge. Let them float off. Let them go. I'll go do it with you. We'll do it together.’ But I am not the father to this daughter — that's not the role I play here. I'm not her professor. I'm not anyone's professor. From teaching people, correcting people, advising and examining and enlightening people, I am retired. I am a seventy-one-year-old man with a thirty-four-year-old mistress; this disqualifies me, in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, from enlightening anyone. I'm taking Viagra, Nathan. There's La Belle Dame sans Merci. I owe all of this turbulence and happiness to Viagra. Without Viagra none of this would be happening. Without Viagra I would have a picture of the world appropriate to my age and wholly different aims. Without Viagra I would have the dignity of an elderly gentleman free from desire who behaves correctly. I would not be doing something that makes no sense. I would not be doing something unseemly, rash, ill considered, and potentially disastrous for all involved. Without Viagra, I could continue, in my declining years, to develop the broad impersonal perspective of an experienced and educated honorably discharged man who has long ago given up the sensual enjoyment of life. I could continue to draw profound philosophical conclusions and have a steadying moral influence on the young, instead of having put myself back into the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication. Thanks to Viagra I've come to understand Zeus's amorous transformations. That's what they should have called Viagra. They should have called it Zeus.”

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