The Humbling by Philip Roth

Essay by Gerald Sorin

Simon Axler, a sixty-five-year-old classical American stage actor, who throughout his career has demonstrated only extraordinary success at his craft, suddenly loses his magic. With his vitality and spontaneity gone, Axler, who had possessed the egomaniacal certainty that he would be wonderful forever, is forced to go on night after night fearing failure. So he overreaches, he thinks too much, and his fear exacerbates and extends the loss of his creative juices. For a while he tries to work at recapturing his “instinctive” talent, but after his Prospero and his Macbeth are panned as ludicrous, Axler has a colossal breakdown. He is troubled that his collapse is only another role he’s playing. But he knows that when you are playing the part of somebody coming apart, there is coherence and order. When you are observing yourself coming apart, that’s something different, something saturated in terror and fear.

Philip Roth succeeds brilliantly at making Axler’s trauma palpable and plausible. As in The Dying Animal, Everyman, and Exit Ghost, Roth has in The Humbling taken on the challenge of confronting the indignities and infirmities of aging and of mortality. And he does so once again with empathy, even in creating Simon Axler, who is an elitist and misogynist, a man with no center and no sustainable identity except when acting. In this last characteristic, Roth may be showing us an exaggerated version of ourselves – creatures who are little more than the sum of the roles we play. At the same time, however, Roth deftly and elegantly suggests the horror and loneliness inherent in a particular life lived without examination or meaning. It is no accident that Roth makes Simon’s last stage role Macbeth, the pretender to the throne who proclaims that life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Act V, Scene V).

After his breakdown, Axler appears to his agent and associates as outwardly self-deprecating. But in reality Axler is full of self-pity. Although he admits, “I am a fraud,” and has had his arrogance deflated, we wonder if he has truly experienced a humbling, that is, if he has finally gained humility. Feeling suicidal, he checks himself into a psychiatric hospital but after less than a month of various treatments and therapies, he returns to his New England farmhouse, his predicament unresolved.

At this point Axler, still self-absorbed, but with no gain in self-awareness, has the opportunity to play another role, not on stage (though he gets offers, even entreaties) but in bed. Stripped as he is of reputation and creative energy, as well as his clothes, he thinks he can restore hope through sexual prowess. The vehicle for his revitalization, Axler believes, is Pegeen Mike Stapleford (named by her amateur actor parents after a character in John Synge’s Playboy of the Western World), a forty-year-old lesbian and daughter of old friends. Pegeen is trying to recover from the breakup of two painful same-sex relationships, one that lasted six years. Axler brings her back temporarily to heterosexuality, even as he makes her over from “butch” to femininity embodied.

Ignoring Pegeen’s warning that their relationship is risky, Axler fantasizes that his “new woman” will not only forget her lesbian past, but will inspire him to resume his professional career. He imagines that she will marry him and even give birth to his child. But Pegeen soon yearns again for female sexual liaison. As unperceptive as ever, Axler tries to sustain Pegeen’s heterosexuality with a threesome. Here Roth, surprisingly in so empathic a novel, is least convincing; several of the graphic sex scenes, one featuring a giant green dildo, seem mere opportunities for the writer’s erotic self-indulgence.

In any case, Axler can do nothing to fix things between him and Pegeen, who like the former actor is dangerously unsure of her own identity. Axler was a test for Pegeen, an experiment. Although she had warned Axler of the risk, Pegeen was not unaware that Simon would be driven back to the abyss of emptiness if their relationship failed. Yet when she informs him that their liaison is over, she does so almost casually, revealing her own shallowness.

As early as page five, we are made aware of the existence of a shotgun in Axler’s attic. One need not know Chekhov’s famous dictum about the inevitable use of that weapon to guess that Axler will use it. And as in Macbeth, it might be said of Axler in The Humbling that “Nothing in his life became him like leaving it; he died as one that had been studied in his death to throw away the dearest thing he owned, as 't were a careless trifle.” (Act I, Scene IV). Suicide is Axler’s final bravura performance. But it is Chekhov’s deeply troubled playwright, Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev in The Seagull, who is truly Axler’s final character. Now that he has experienced the humbling of his having been “a lesbian’s thirteen-month mistake,” Simon thinks, “what could be more fitting” than a return to acting through suicide. His eight-word note, found by his cleaning woman, quotes the final spoken line of The Seagull: “The fact is, Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself.”

The Humbling, Roth’s thirtieth book, will entrance and impress readers, even those already convinced of the writer’s mastery of style and the ultimate control he maintains over his imagined characters. And at 140 pages, its brevity may appropriately mirror and underline just how soon come life’s losses and extinction. But one wants even more from America’s pre-eminent novelist. The novella, like Goodbye Columbus, with which he began his career, suits Roth; but The Humbling, unlike Everyman and Indignation, feels more like a well-written prospectus than a fully developed work.

In the last ten years, Roth, as if believing that like Axler he might suddenly lose his magic, has published eight books. It’s a stunning rate of productivity, especially for a man now seventy-six. This reader, however, awaits another big book, and Nemesis, scheduled for release in 2010, doesn’t promise to be it. But last year Roth told an interviewer: “I want to have a project that will occupy me until my death. I’m ready for... a 25-year book. And when I’m 100, I will hand it in and then lie down in darkness.” We can hope that this was not mere Rothian irony. Long may he live! -- and give us at least one more of his great novels, dense and complex, like Mickey’s Sabbath, American Pastoral or The Plot Against America.

Excerpts

She was an elfin, pale-skinned brunette with the bony frailty of a sickly girl of about a quarter of her age. Her name was Sybil Van Buren. In the eyes of the actor hers was a thirty-five-year-old body that not only refused to be strong but dreaded even the appearance of strength. And yet for all her delicacy, she’s said to him, on the way up the path to the main residence hall from art therapy, “Will you eat dinner with me, Simon?” Amazing. Still some kind of wish in her not to be swallowed up. Or maybe she’d asked to stay on at his side in the hope that with a little luck something would ignite between them that would complete the doing in of her. He was big enough for the job, more than whale enough for a tiny bundle of flotsam like her. Even here – where, without assistance from the pharmacopoeia, any show of stability, let alone bravado, was unlikely to quell for long the maelstrom of terror swirling back of the gullet – he had not the loose, swaggering gait of the ominous man that had once gone toward making him such an original Othello. (pages 19–20)

“When I had a truly wretched performance, I would lie awake all night afterward thinking, ‘I’ve lost it, I have no talent, I can’t do anything.’ Hours would go by, but then all of a sudden, at five or six in the morning, I’d understand what went wrong and I couldn’t wait to get to the theater that evening and go on. And I’d go on and I couldn’t make a mistake. A beautiful feeling. There are days when you can’t wait to get there, when the marriage between you and the role is perfect and there’s never a time when you’re not happy to sail out onto the stage. Those are important days. And for years I had them one after the other. Well, that’s over. Now if I were to go out on the stage, I wouldn’t know what I was out there for.” (pages 28–29)

He bought her necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. He bought her luxurious lingerie to replace the sport bras and the gray briefs. He bought her little satin babydolls to replace her flannel pajamas. He bought her calf-high boots, a brown pair and a black pair. The only coat she owned she’d inherited from Priscilla’s late mother. It was way too large for her and shaped like a box, and so over the next few months he bought her flattering new coats – five of them. He could have bought her a hundred. He couldn’t stop. Living as he did, he rarely spent anything on himself, and nothing made him happier than making her look like she’d never looked before. And in time nothing seemed to maker her happier. It was an orgy of spoiling and spending that suited them both just fine. (page 59)

Questions

1. Do you think Simon Axler is Jewish? Why or why not? Does it matter?
2. Why do the Staplefords, Pegeen’s parents, object to their lesbian daughter’s heterosexual affair with Axler? Is it only his age?
3. Axler believes that Asa and Carol Stapleford are responsible for the breakup of his relationship with Pegeen. Is he right? What does this belief say about his mental picture of Pegeen?
4. Axler’s anger at his loss of Pegeen is directed at several people. Who, other than her parents, are they? Are any of them responsible, alone, or in combination?
5. Axler admires the woman he meets in the psychiatric treatment center who murdered her husband for his sexual abuse of their daughter; and he tells himself “if she could do it,” if she could kill, so can he. Why does he choose suicide over homicide?
6. In giving us an hysterical female college dean, and Pegeen’s female partner, Priscilla, who mutilates her body and transfigures herself into a man, as well as an ambivalent and promiscuous Pegeen herself, has Roth slipped back into the misogynistic portrayals embedded in his earlier books, such as The Great American Novel, My Life as a Man, and Portnoy’s Complaint?
7. What plays mentioned in The Humbling, other than Macbeth and The Seagull, are relevant to Roth’s dark narrative? In what ways?
8. Some critics have suggested that Roth’s “frantic” productivity rate is a function of his campaign to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. What do you think? What other American writers have won the prize? Does Roth deserve it? Is he being overlooked mainly because he is seen as “male, pale, and stale?”

---

The Jewish Reader is a publication of the National Yiddish Book Center
Amherst, MA.
Editor: Nancy Sherman www.jewishreader.org