American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions

Esquire’s January 1962 issue contained an excerpt from Philip Roth’s novel Letting Go titled “Very Happy Poems.” Taken from the middle of the novel, these are the words that the high-strung Libby Herz is reduced to uttering when encouraged by the representative of an adoption agency to describe the “kind” of poems she writes. None the wiser from his initial line of inquiry—“Do you write nature poems, do you write, oh I don’t know, rhymes, do you write little jingles?”—the agent tries again, following Libby’s breathy declarations of enthusiasm for Keats, Donne, and Yeats: “And how about your own poems? I mean—would you say they’re, oh I don’t know, happy poems or unhappy poems? You know, people write all kinds of poems, happy poems, unhappy poems—what do you consider yours to be?” “Happy poems,” said Libby. “Very happy poems.”¹ The situation is uncomfortable, not least because the flustered Libby desperately wants to demonstrate her motherly fitness to the adoption agent, an “easygoing” young man who nevertheless “intimidate[s]” her (LG 332). In turn, she perplexes the agent by disavowing being a writer of poems, despite having already told him she was writing a poem just before he arrived, which isn’t the truth but not exactly a lie either.² Roth’s intimate focus on Libby’s perspective (for the first time in the novel) intensifies the sense of her agonizing difficulty countenancing the specific contingencies of her life—her husband Paul’s sexual remoteness, her kidney ailment, their quasi-bohemian poverty and childlessness—and presenting a coherent version of herself to the external world. While such contingencies are presented as credible sources of frustration, Roth implies that Libby’s emotional and psychic predicament is aggravated by an unrealistic expectation of ease and happiness, of ease as happiness. She would in fact like to wake up any given morning and, without prior effort or practice, compose some very happy poems.

Vividly portraying the near crack-up of this intelligent but misguided and overly sensitive character, the Esquire excerpt showcased Roth’s talent for writing what might be called excruciating realism. But it also signaled that among the many concerns of the forthcoming novel (released later that year) was the relation between aesthetic value or quality and that paradigmatic postwar American feeling, happiness. What’s particularly notable about the exchange between Libby and the adoption agent is not that it revolves around literary production, a self-reflexive theme that pervades Roth’s fiction; nor that it engages the vocabulary of happiness in postwar America, which also recurs often enough in his work. Rather, it is the way this exchange imagines the two distinct pursuits of art and happiness as forming a compound precipitate, the happy poem. Forming, yet also deforming: for even as the two characters summon the happy poem into being, Roth suggests that it remains mere wish fulfillment. With Libby’s happy poems claimed but disclaimed, not yet written but yearned for, genuinely esteemed by her but articulated as such only by echoing an affable social worker’s prying terms, Roth places this imagined artifact under the pressure of multiple and conflicting valences.

This essay takes the Esquire excerpt’s staged problematic as the point of departure for an examination of Roth’s aesthetic and affective commitments at mid-century. At times Roth can be seen to join the era’s intelligentsia and literati in dismissing happy art as a middle-class monstrosity, a kitschy blob threatening to suffocate postwar America. What might qualify as Exhibit A in the category of happy art monstrosity, as the historian of happiness Darrin McMahon suggests, is the “smiley face.” It is in 1963 that an advertising executive invented this “modern icon,” earning him a $45 commission, only to see it virally proliferate, selling annually in the form of 50 million buttons alone by 1971, and coming to rival “in certain quarters … the Cross and the Star of David.”³ But Exhibit B could well be drawn from one of Roth’s early works, Portnoy’s Complaint, where Portnoy extols his Jewish family’s Thanksgiving tradition over and against that of his WASP girlfriend Pumpkin’s, whose family in Davenport, Iowa, all look and act too much like folks in “a painting by Norman Rockwell.”⁴ At other times, however, happy art becomes for Roth an occasion to explore more deeply the existential and even ethical significance of both aesthetic and affective experience. In these instances, he puts into narrative play a range of conceptual, structural, and dispositional conditions that coalesce around the happy art object and test its precarious viability, thus revealing the potential for art and happiness to function as mutually animating values and qualities. Moreover, Roth draws attention to happiness’s labile function within circuits of experience involving aesthetic engagement and arguably more mundane aspects of living a middle-class life, such as working at a white-collar job. He thereby registers a commitment to certain middle-class norms—a commitment, however, that is less concerned to reinforce and perpetuate postwar norms as they are than to imagine them as they might be.⁵

If happy art is subject to a rather withering trial by fire in Letting Go, its baptism in Roth’s better-known earlier work, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), proves more promising. In this text historically actual artifacts such as Gauguin prints and Mantovani records vie for value priority, even if the contest is heavily weighted by authorial favoritism. Despite Roth’s relish, as Jonathan Freedman convincingly shows in Klezmer America, for “popular and mass culture of the last century, particularly … [that of] the 1940s and 1950s,” he clearly deems all too easy the mode of listening Mantovani music elicits.⁶ And despite Roth’s equally pronounced appreciation, as Ross Posnock richly elaborates in Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, for high modernism and literary experimentalism,⁷ Gauguin’s paintings gain significance less for their modernist challenge or formal innovation than for the intense pleasure they bring to the uninitiated beholder and the genial dialogue they prompt. The happy art object’s potential value, Roth implies, involves but is not reducible to its creator’s expressive achievement; this value depends in no small measure on the beholder’s capacities and ambitions as well as on the art object’s relational function within a social system.

What might be called Roth’s normative (as opposed to modernist or populist) challenge to happy art’s smiley-faced normality takes shape within a broader discourse of happiness at mid-century.⁸ The Declaration of Independence may have etched the right to pursue happiness into Americans’ consciousness from 1776 onward, but not until the nation’s claim to World War II triumph and the ensuing economic boom did happiness come to be equated with an American sense of entitlement, emerging as a kind of affective correlative of the nation-state. It thus became a social critic’s veritable obligation to disparage happiness, stigmatizing it as the foremost index of middle-class conformity, complacency, and shallow materialism. In his 1953 book on the subject, The Pursuit of Happiness, the eminent historian Howard Mumford Jones summed up the conditions of happiness that rendered it a pox on the nation:

The United States remains a happy land, the land of good cheer, God’s country. It produces the Optimists’ Club, the glad books, the Boosters’ society, manuals on how to attain peace of mind, songs to the effect that though I want to be happy, I can’t be happy unless you are happy too …. Advertisements reveal our folkways. They prove that the effect of purchasing American cigarets [sic], oil furnaces, laxatives, shirts, automobiles, house paint, television sets, coffee, nylon stockings, vacuum cleaners, chewing gum, coated paper, electric trains, and dog food is the instant creation of felicity.⁹

Not only advertisements, of course, but advice columns, children’s books, stories in slick magazines, excessive leisure, indeed, the ubiquitous insistence on “having a good time,” all contribute to “guaranteeing the American citizen the ghastly privilege of pursuing a phantom and embracing a delusion” (PH 138, 17). With this ominous witticism Jones manages to turn Kant’s well-known statement about happiness’s elusiveness on its head. Kant viewed happiness as a natural inclination, but one rendered elusively indeterminate by our cognitive limitations as to what would make us happy and by the gap between our empirical “wishes and wills” and “the idea of happiness.” This idea “require[s] an absolute whole, a maximum of well-being” both in the present and the future, which is unknowable: “In short [the human being] is not capable of any principle by which to determine with complete certainty what would make him truly happy, because for this omniscience would be required.” Kant thus considered happiness “not an ideal of reason but of imagination.”¹⁰ Jones, however, converts postwar happiness’s elusiveness into gothic obsessiveness and imagination into a generator of patently false phantasms.

Jones’s oddly good-natured book chronicles happiness’s demise. It tells how a series of judicial decisions (involving such concerns as the right of inheritance and employment contract) conspired to render happiness a function of libertarian proprietary ideology; it also tracks pernicious shifts in cultural value, exemplified most dismayingly by Emerson’s and William James’s respective alignment of happiness with self-fulfillment and personal adjustment. By the postwar era, these propensities have devolved into navel-gazing self-expression and personal therapy. This “inheritance,” Jones complains, has “translated the problem of the right to happiness out of ethics, out of law, and out of religion into a problem of both national and individual psychology, normal or otherwise” (PH 129–30).¹¹ Yet Jones is confident that the founders had more in mind than Locke’s sense of privacy, that their declaration protecting the pursuit of happiness was predicated on Blackstone’s natural-law assumption “that the law of nature being itself the product of divine benevolence, must be the only model for human law, so that in proportion as human law mirrors universal reason, citizens obedient to its ancient sanctions must secure felicity” (PH 105). By Jones’s quasi-Aristotelian lights, then, genuine happiness must be keyed to public reason and virtuous action, inscribed within an empirically determinate teleology.

Other critics, even those with less pointed political concerns, developed a sharper social psychology than Jones’s, as exemplified by the Princeton sociologist Melvin Tumin in a 1957 essay (he would befriend Roth some five years later). “A society is in real trouble with itself,” he intones, “when its people get unthinking and unfeeling enough to consider ‘happiness’ as the prime goal in life. … The fact is simple: happiness is no guide to anything.” Here happiness barely qualifies as a feeling; only “unfeeling” people pursue it, threatening open society by eroding “critical, reflective judgment based on sound experience.”¹² According to the more radical left, middle-class happiness was essentially a symptom of false consciousness—thus an historical and ontological problem more than a psychological one—fictively exemplified by the pathetic figure Willy Loman who names his son Happy. The sociologist C. Wright Mills may harbor more empathy than Tumin for such “trapped” cogs of the military-industrial complex who generally “cannot overcome their troubles,” but his verdict is similar: they are the ones whose “authority is confined strictly within a prescribed orbit of occupational actions,” thus whose “power” is at best “a borrowed thing.”¹³ This quasi-Marxist sense of the white-collar worker’s inability to be genuinely happy also dovetailed with the era’s Freudian theorists for whom happiness is always already undone by the psyche’s overdetermined, pleasure-thwarting ways. Indeed, as Catherine Jurca has expansively shown in White Diaspora, the unhappier you found yourself at mid-century, the more distinctive and glamorous you might appear. Shored up by narcissistic self-pity, white suburbanites in gray flannel suits could join this special crew of misérables when their “houses and furnishings reflexively become evidence of and opportunities for alienation,” thereby allowing them to count themselves among the “malcontents” rather than the “mindless conformists.”¹⁴ In such accounts of alienation, Jurca suggests, there may be more bad faith than false consciousness at work.

For all the skepticism of mid-century happiness that Roth appears at times to share with the era’s critics, he is less inclined to fix its position on the cultural landscape with witticism, ironic historiography, psycho-political complaint, or blanket stigmatization. “Everything will turn,” Jones contended in his book’s penultimate paragraph, “on the question whether happiness is construed in modern America as primarily an individual or primarily a social state” (PH 164). Roth doesn’t disagree with this claim; but he doesn’t share Jones’s vision of rectifying the balance by reattaching happiness to its roots in Aristotelian virtue. He harbors some of Jones’s suspicion of the postwar era’s hyperpersonalization of happiness, but he doesn’t abandon an essentially subjective orientation toward its meaning and value.

The alternative route to reinvigorating the idea of happiness that Roth’s fiction fleshes out does resonate, however, with the work of other social analysts of the postwar era. These include Lionel Trilling, David Riesman, and William Whyte, who are often identified with cold war consensus ideology but whose ideas and arguments distinctly contest this ideology’s blithe assumptions about American society’s achievement of harmonious stability, its “indifferen[ce] to questions about the ultimate worth of capitalism and the underlying values of American life.”¹⁵ Roth can be seen, in effect, to answer Trilling’s chastening call, in his 1951 essay on William Dean Howells, to examine more critically the seductions of modernist aesthetics of extremity and to take more interest in Howells’s depiction of “civil personalities” and their “moderate sentiments.” Trilling’s effort to rehabilitate the Howellsian aesthetic of “the ‘more smiling aspects’ of life” signals, as one sympathetic critic puts it, a “serious” but inadequate “attempt to recover the lost imagination of happiness.”¹⁶

If Trilling’s aesthetic revaluation remains overshadowed by his own modernist commitments and polemics, Riesman proves a more illuminating beacon. Better known for his critique of “other-directed” group identification (and conformity more generally) advanced in The Lonely Crowd (1950), Riesman took “vitality and happiness, even in a time of troubles” to be a sign of a person’s autonomous potentiality.¹⁷ He developed this point as early as 1947 in “The Ethics of We Happy Few,” evidently prompted by the appearance the year before of the novel We Happy Few by Helen Howe (and by Diana Trilling’s review of it in the Nation), which satirized Harvard humanities professors’ smug and snobbish left-leaning elitism. In brief, Dorothea, the faculty-wife protagonist who is the smuggest of them all, eventually comes to exalt the “truth” of self-sacrificing wartime service, namely, that it requires “simply the power to forget yourself—completely.” After a series of personally humiliating and humbling experiences, Dorothea of the Few is able genuinely to care about, succor, and even join the Many on their knees in prayer because “the albatross of her self had gone.”¹⁸ In this manner the novel imagines the discovery of true happiness as assuming the force of a nationalist theology and personal obligation, articulating a social logic that Riesman critiques and against which he advances an alternative set of political and existential propositions. He strenuously objects to Howe’s implicit endorsement of Dorothea’s self-belittling, self-accusing, and self-sacrificing means of self-correction, which he deems masochistic and ultimately unethical. They reflect her surrender to the “phoniness of ‘sharing’ common experiences,” her abdication of an intellectual’s “critical uniqueness” and “individuality of interpretation.” With (quoting Howe) the “burden of being one’s own arbiter of taste and feeling” removed, Riesman contends, the “ethical convictions that they [Dorothea and others] lack are the belief in their own values.”¹⁹ By “belief” Riesman means a commitment to the frame of mind and conceptual conditions that enable the validation of one’s values—in other words, not just having values but self-consciously valuing one’s values.

This valuation logic thus entails an ethical component that subordinates the anthropological or naturalist fact of valuing (which amounts to mere behavior) to the humanist fact of valuing (which is predicated on self-awareness and endorsement). Echoing his mentor Erich Fromm, Riesman sees the acceptance of being one’s own arbiter of taste and feeling as a nonnegotiable element of a “rational individualist ethics.” It is what enables both the many and the few not just to feel but to assess their happiness. The belief in the value and human capacity of “self-love” is Riesman’s ethical, existential, and political-economic starting point. Not to be confused with selfishness or narcissism, Frommian self-love is more akin to the concept of autonomy that Riesman elsewhere develops: “the self-loving person is confident of his own self-evaluation” and is thus “capable of loving [others] as he loves himself.”²⁰ As a dimension of self-love, the pursuit of happiness doesn’t threaten the critical faculty, as Tumin and others suppose, but rather enables its cultivation, thus playing a crucial role in the formation of an open society.

When Libby pronounces those three words, “very happy poems,” she in effect allows the adoption agent to put words in her mouth; she thus commits Dorothea’s crime of surrendering the arbitration of her own taste and feeling. To be sure, Libby is grasping here for anything on offer that might favorably impress the adoption agent; that is, her authorial claim to very happy poems looks something like the single remaining arrow in her quiver of positive self-projections. But this instrumentalization of her taste and feeling doesn’t entirely exonerate her, for she has also committed the misdemeanor of biographical fallacy: she presumes (and wants the adoption agent to presume) that a happy poem reflects its author’s happy disposition. Indeed, it is as though the falsity with which she releases the arrow—the falsity arising both from the fact that she hasn’t written any poems and from this fallacy’s illogic—causes it masochistically to reverse course, rendering Libby herself, along with her esteem for happy poems, its wounded target. Further deepening the wound is that inwardly, too, she seems to think that writing happy poems will make her happy. While theoretically possible—some writers of happy poems doubtlessly derive happiness from their creative production—her affective economy to date evinces its utter unlikelihood. She who is manifestly frustrated and miserable and who has a scheduled appointment with a psychoanalyst that afternoon thus entraps herself in a double bind: she can’t write happy poems unless she’s happy, but she can’t be happy unless she writes happy poems.

At the same time, as Roth reveals the crippling aesthetic-authorial psychology underlying Libby’s phantasm of the happy poem, he references a work of visual art that reveals Libby’s concomitant inability to engage in any meaningful way with actually existing happy art. A painting by the picturesque impressionist Utrillo may not be as immediately recognizable a happy art object as the Norman Rockwell illustrations Alexander Portnoy loves to loathe, but in Letting Go a print by this painter, which Libby has tacked to her and Paul’s various apartment walls since college, assumes this status, eliciting its beholders’ undemanding, mildly positive engagement. However, it too proves problematic, but less on account of this engagement’s mildness than its merely personal orientation. This comes into focus when Libby finds the adoption agent “standing before the Utrillo print,” casually regarding it (LG 333). “Corny” is how Libby apologetically now assesses it, deploying a term that manages to elide the distinction between her judgment of the painting and her judgment of her personal history of owning the print. As they proceed to discuss its provenance and artistic value, with him suggesting that her fondness for the print is based on “sentimental reasons,” she doesn’t entirely succumb to the agent’s attempt to put words in her mouth; but neither can she quite resist him: “‘Well … I just like it. Yes, sentiment—but aesthetics, of course, too.’ She did not know what more to say. They both were smiling” (LG 334). This halting response doesn’t so much refute his notion of sentimentality as redirect it away from causal explanation and toward a sentimental aesthetic theory: just liking. As Roth implies by Libby’s ensuing speechlessness and both characters’ smiles, there’s nothing exactly wrong with pleasing art objects, but an aesthetic engagement that involves no critical sense has severely limited social and even existential value. Such stunted engagement as just smiling risks reversion to the “phony” mode of sharing common experience that Riesman critiques. Reduced to just being liked by Libby, the Utrillo print begins to look at best like a prosthetic substitute for writing happy poems or a compensation for not writing them.

In broader aesthetic-theoretical terms, Roth’s portrayal of Libby’s predicament renders palpable the hazard of excluding the element of disinterest (in the Kantian sense of purposelessness) from aesthetic production and indeed from the affective experience of art: all too interested in determining her happy poems’ cause and effect and all too personal in her response to happy paintings, Libby’s aesthetic investments are destined to yield low returns. To put it another way, and to borrow Charles Altieri’s provocative terms for theorizing “an aesthetics of the affects,” Libby treats happiness too much like an “adjective,” an empirical abstraction, rather than an “adverb,” a quality of reflexive action. She converts it into a “fixed objective state,” one that is describable in “standard adjectival terms” and that conforms too readily to an established belief system.²¹ Though “just dying to be happy,” Libby proves incapable of experiencing happiness reflexively because, for her, happiness isn’t simply an inclination or an elusive pursuit; it is a belief system, as indicated by one of the nearly random thoughts that enters her mind right before she opens the door to the adoption agent: “She did not really believe in unhappiness and privation and never would” (LG 615, 332). But failing to key her affective and aesthetic belief in happiness to productive imagining, she reverts to the reductive paradigm of aesthetic fantasy and affective abstraction. More than an antidote to her husband’s own melancholic “belie[f] in doom” and “mourning” (LG 615), Libby’s obsession with happiness is a dispositional affliction that at once totalizes and diminishes her existence. As she replies to Paul’s observation that she “think[s] too much about being happy,” “that’s all there is” (LG 616).

III

However negatively inflected, the aesthetic orientation exemplified in Letting Go helps to clarify the stakes of Roth’s configuration, in Goodbye, Columbus, of art and happiness as mutually constructive, as values worth valuing. In this novella, moreover, Roth engages directly with the terms and arguments of the mid-century sociological imagination by situating the happiness problematic in the context of suburban domesticity and white-collar work—that is, where both happiness and art are putatively most compromised by compulsory normality.²² The novella is contrapuntally structured around the main plot of Newark-dwelling Neil Klugman’s summertime romance with suburbanite Brenda Patimkin and the subplot of his workaday tactics in the Newark Public Library to help a black boy maintain access to the art books he more than “just” likes. These narrative vectors pivot on Neil’s sense of his employment as public librarian—in effect, as a white-collar bureaucrat. In Brenda’s world, Neil is, as Althusser might say, occupationally hailed—and not without chagrin. His lowly job becomes a source of defensiveness, defining him as bereft of ambition and a career plan.²³ On the other hand, the work he takes upon himself to protect the black boy from his fellow librarians’ narrow-minded rigidity and racism not only enables the boy’s enjoyment of Gauguin reproductions of Tahitian paradise but turns out also to contribute to Neil’s recovery of his own imaginative capacities.²⁴ Directly following the scene in which Neil finds the boy with the “expensive” art book and discusses the “pictures” with him (GC 37), Roth places Neil back “at the Information Desk thinking about Brenda and … Short Hills, which [he] could see now, in [his] mind’s eye, at dusk, rose-colored, like a Gauguin stream” (GC 38). He stages, in effect, two different versions of pursuing happiness, imaged and twinned through the trope of paradise, with each version’s stakes and contours rendered more visible by the contrast.

This trope of paradise further serves to intertwine the questions of happiness and art with that other postwar middle-class conundrum, leisure. Critics of all stripes fretted that Americans, rather than educating or cultivating themselves in their leisure time, “sought distractions … [and] the excitement, the spontaneity, and the ‘immediate satisfactions’ they missed on the job.” Others “insisted that only when work and leisure were reintegrated could culture become an important part of, rather than a flight from, daily life.”²⁵ In Roth’s novella the fact that Brenda is home on summer vacation, and that the romance with Neil fully blossoms when he spends his two-week vacation with her at her parents’ suburban home, reflects the abundance of their leisure time; it signals as well the degrading effect the syndrome of work-leisure segregation will have on both their work and leisure. Conforming to sociological type, Brenda and Neil do become each other’s source of excitement and immediate satisfaction. Indeed, Roth appears to share Riesman’s more specific criticism of contemporary youth for its “lack of imagination,” for turning “sexual intimacy” into a “chief leisure resort” bereft of “joyful[ness].”²⁶ Neil and Brenda’s sexual intimacy succumbs to this state as it gets bound up with the Patimkin family’s entangled hierarchy of affection. The couple may well exploit the suburban home’s ample opportunity for privacy, having sex for the first time in the spatially segregated TV room. But Neil can’t disentangle the charm of this occasion from the mounting resentment he feels, having been peremptorily assigned to babysit Brenda’s coddled little sister Julie, who feeds on the illusion of being the family’s crack basketball and ping-pong player and is always allowed to win. “How can I describe loving Brenda?” Neil later mulls, “It was so sweet, as though I’d finally scored that twenty-first point” (GC 46).

Moreover, Neil’s need to prove that he possesses a winning critical intelligence registers a kind of metasociological conformity. Throughout the affair with Brenda, he marvels at and indulges in the Patimkin family’s overabundance of everything; but he is also apt to sneer at their country club attitudes, identifying their mindset with the herd mentality. Indeed, Neil creates opportunities to adopt the stance of a sociologist who witnesses—more precisely, pictures—affluent suburbanites at their most herdlike. Hence his afternoon drive to a nearby deer park where he sees in close proximity the “tawny-skinned mothers” of young deer and the “white-skinned mothers” of young children feeding them popcorn (GC 95). For Norman Rockwell this scene would be pastoral perfection. But, for Neil, these are mothers who “compared suntans, supermarkets, and vacations,” whose “hair would always stay the color they desired,” whose “clothes [were] the right texture and shade,” whose “homes … would have simple Swedish modern when that was fashionable”—in sum, whose “money and comfort” had rendered their individual differences “microscopic,” thus whose “fates had collapsed them into one” (GC 96). With this conspicuously severe but also boilerplate analysis, Neil betrays a willingness to parrot the critical condescension of such mid-century analysts as Jones, Mills, and Tumin, an attitude that prepares them to read all evidence of abundance as symptomatic expressions of mindless complacency and/or illusory happiness. This condescension later informs the “psychoanalytical crap,” as Brenda calls it (GC 132), Neil wields to explain her actions, provoking their recrimination-filled dispute over her mother’s outraged discovery of the diaphragm that he persuaded her to obtain. After the break-up he finds himself staring at his reflection in the darkened window of Lamont Library, asking himself circular questions: “What was it inside me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing—who knows—into winning?” (GC 135). Such questions reflect the couple’s failure to reach beyond predictable, indeed almost compulsory, norms of flirtation and passion, to access what Riesman would deem a more joyful and imaginative level of intimacy.

Roth, however, doesn’t let his protagonist languish in a logic of self-loathing, where winning and losing determine the measure of self-worth. The longer Neil stares at his reflection, the more he sees something else: “I looked hard at the image of me, at that darkening of the glass, and then my gaze pushed through it, over the cool floor, to a broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved” (GC 136). Literally, of course, the darkness of the glass makes it difficult for Neil to see what’s behind it, an optical reality that figuratively corresponds to his fixation on the surface psychology of injured vanity. But the glass’s heightened state of qualitative transformation, its darkening, also prompts Neil to “push through,” which figuratively maps onto his more searching inner examination. Only a seasoned librarian would notice shelving imperfections; but only a self-loving white-collar aesthete would be drawn to the impersonal furniture of his work-time consciousness—to books in a library—in search of an objective correlative of his affective plight. As Neil transfers this observational sensitivity to his inner world, taking inventory of what might be called the library of his soul, he discovers it in disarray but not beyond repair. For as though in aesthetic overdrive, Neil turns this crisis-induced introspection into an occasion for the subtle but dramatic revaluation of his own sense of postwar bounty, of plenitude: “I did not look very much longer, but took a train that got me to Newark just as the sun was rising on the first day of the Jewish New Year. I was back in plenty of time for work” (GC 136). Here, at narrative’s end, in addition to converting selective details of reality into shopworn tropes of renewal (the rising sun, the New Year), Neil more inventively uncouples the phenomenon of abundance from suburban affluence and draws it into his own sphere of life. Leisure time may be no less a commodity than Swedish furniture, but having “plenty” of it is a function of a prospering mixed economy, of having a public service job that turns the empty anxious time of the unemployed into positive time off.

For Neil, then, the relation between leisure and work undergoes crucial recalibration. Whereas the romance with Brenda at first serves as an escape from the job that Neil has “beg[u]n to fear” is “pump[ing]” him with “numbness” (GC 33), his almost eager thought of returning to work suggests that he now views it not so much as a segregated alternative to a botched love life, but as a place for self-validation based on renewed appreciation for the library and his own function in it. Such is the retrospectively implied effect of his earlier solicitude toward the black boy, who continues over the weeks to linger in his mind. During his vacation in Short Hills, for instance, Neil has a somewhat troubling dream of being on a boat with the boy in the harbor of a Pacific island; later, when he’s back at work and Brenda back at school, he observes that he “never did see the colored kid again,” wondering if he “discovered” another painter’s work or went “back to playing Willie Mays in the streets” (GC 120). These imagined scenes form a temporal continuum extending to (and reinforcing the significance of) Neil’s later sense of work-time plenitude, with his reflexive “gaze” into the “darkening” window of another library supplying the realist-symbolic relay between the boy’s “playing” and Neil’s work.

In other words, Neil’s job doesn’t so much hail him into occupational identity as open up a world in which he functions as a productively imaginative municipal agent. Neil goes to a lot of trouble to protect the black boy from the other librarians, anxious and racist as they are. Indeed, he engages in what the Howells-reading Trilling might call a civil person’s intuitive acts of righteous disobedience to prevent the boy’s favorite book of Gauguin reproductions from being checked out by another, far less needy patron—acts that are retroactively made good by the boy’s explanation that he can’t take the book home because “somebody [would] dee-stroy it” there (GC 60). While it is possible to criticize Neil for this subterfuge and arguably even more for fueling an impoverished kid’s desire for unattainable tropical fantasies—as Neil himself momentarily and half-heartedly does when he thinks back on his dream (GC 120)—these fallibilities (if they are such) stand in tension with the immensely valuable role Neil plays in the development of the boy’s self-sourced faculty of imagination.

Neil’s initial encounter with the boy takes place on the library steps outside, where he spies him playfully tormenting one of the “pale cement lions” (GC 31): “He would growl, low and long, drop back, wait, then growl again,” earning Neil’s epithet, “the lion tamer” (GC 32, 33). In his taunting and taming play, the black boy registers a capacity for what Riesman calls “good play,” which involves the “excited concentration” of “tasks” that are neither “too demanding” nor “not demanding enough”—a kind of “new-found mastery.”²⁷ Later directing the boy to what Neil himself playfully hears him call the “heart section” (he could have opted for the more prosaic phonetic spelling, “hart”), Neil then finds him there with an open book on his lap and in deep enchantment: “[his] lips were parted, the eyes wide, and even the ears seemed to have a heightened receptivity. He looked ecstatic” (GC 34, 36). Creating opportunities for this activity’s repetition and expansion seems the least a creatively conscientious bureaucrat can do; indeed, it is the sort of engagement that enables (in an existential if not remunerative sense) “the boundaries between work and play [to] become shadowy.”²⁸ Neil himself suggests as much in another evocative pun. Hoping not to appear suspicious of the boy and interrupt his contemplative ecstasy, he pretends to search for a book: “I fished around the lowest shelves a moment, playing at work” (GC 36).

To be sure, the boy’s ecstatic state falls more easily into the category of vehement passion than alongside such moderate feelings as happiness. In his recent book, The Vehement Passions, Philip Fisher distinguishes vehement states (such as anger, shame, fear, and wonder) from emotional ones (particularly happiness, discussed in the concluding chapter) on the basis of their multiple demands on subjectivity: undivided involvement, suspension of temporal consciousness, abolition of privacy by inducing bodily (i.e., publicly evident) expression, to name the most extreme. These demands work to “reinstall an absolute priority of the self, with its claim to be different from and prior to others both in the claims of its will and in its account of the world.”²⁹ Roth might appear, in his portrayal of the black boy’s ecstatic state, to endorse Fisher’s valorization of vehemence over such “middle-class categories” as emotions and feelings, which instead give priority to “the everyday world”—a world that threatens, in its legislation of reciprocity and good will, the self’s singularity, that is, its experience of “nonreciprocal intimacy.”³⁰ But as the scene with the black boy unfolds, Roth reveals not only that the library, this paradigmatic middle-class institution, serves as a kind of curatorial site of vehement wonder, but also that reciprocity and good will themselves enable an enlarged or intensified experience of singularity within the affective realm of happiness. Reciprocity and singularity need not be mutually exclusive, as Neil’s orientation toward the black boy makes visible.

To begin with, Neil’s interest in the black boy goes well beyond institutional solicitude; it could indeed be called aesthetic. Attending to the curious particulars of the boy’s painterly appeal, Neil converts him into a work of happy art: “By the light of the window behind him I could see the hundreds of spaces between the hundreds of tiny black corkscrews that were his hair. He was very black and shiny, and the flesh of his lips did not so much appear to be a different color as it looked to be unfinished and awaiting another coat” (GC 36). Here Neil exhibits, in distinct contrast to Libby, a capacity for careful but disinterested aesthetic appreciation, enhancing his own self-loving singularity. Roth’s emphasis on Neil’s reflexive perspective—“I could see,” “appear to be,” “looked to be”—suggests that the boy’s incarnation of the happy art object doesn’t cause Neil’s appreciative pleasure so much as occasion or inspire Neil’s attentive regard, which Neil then relishes for its own, productively imaginative, self-prioritizing sake. In other words, this mode of appreciation may be intimately keyed to Neil’s good will to promote the boy’s happiness, but it cannot be reduced to it.

Here the pedagogy contributes to both interlocutors’ affective enhancement as well as to their critical sensibility. Learning that Tahiti is in fact a “place you can go” to, the boy’s inclination to vehemence resurfaces as “euphoria,” prompting an unguarded expression of delight: “that’s the fuckin life” (GC 37). Less communicative than exclamatory and self-concentrating, this comment tellingly elicits no response from Neil: the more forceful the vehemence, Roth suggests, the closer Gauguin’s work will indeed have to suit the claims of the boy’s will and his account of the world (which might be called “just enthusing”). While the boy doesn’t exactly relinquish this claim—implied by his continued idiosyncratic reference to Gauguin as a “picture taker” rather than a painter (GC 37)—one could say he tempers it with faint expressions of reflective judgment. However underdeveloped, this capacity emerges when he descriptively expounds on one Gauguin image of “three native women standing knee-high in a rose-colored stream”: “These people, man, they sure does look cool. They ain’t no yelling or shouting here, you could just see it” (GC 37). As in Neil’s description, cited earlier, of the boy himself, the perspectivalist vocabulary—“look,” “see”—suggests the introduction of an interpretive or judgmental orientation, but one relaxed by communicative happiness.

Trading nonreciprocal intimacy for intimate reciprocity, the black boy thus enters the sphere in which critical or interpretive disagreement becomes possible—where, for instance, an interlocutor might opine that the women look benumbed or sedated rather than cool. Neil turns out not to disagree, but, as though completing a circuit of pedagogical reciprocity, he arrives at a slightly more sophisticated version of the black boy’s account: “It was a silent picture, he was right” (GC 37). Here Neil shifts attention away from the appealing absence of noisy actions by particular “people” in the painting toward its overall mood or atmosphere; but he also preserves the boy’s initial intuition. Similarly, when the boy asks, rather than exclaims, “Ain’t that the fuckin life?” Neil finds himself able at least laconically to respond: “I agreed it was and left” (GC 37). No wonder he appears happy, weeks later, to be “back in plenty of time for work” (GC 136).

At the same time, the fact that Neil will soon never see the boy again suggests the functional limitations of Neil’s municipal agency: his work as librarian may be valuable, even crucial, but it remains, like Kantian happiness, elusively indeterminate. For better and worse, training will never be everything. Rather, the important thing in this novella is to illustrate, whether in the form of a public institution’s statuary decoration that in part signifies “pale” culture’s self-lionizing ways or in the form of expensive reproductions of a “white man[‘s]” modernist paintings of “young brown-skinned maid[s]” (GC 37), how much the aesthetic object’s capacity to elicit its beholder’s affective and imaginative engagement depends on the beholder himself or herself, along with the social value of (and institutional support for) that engagement. The contrast could hardly be greater between the black boy’s aesthetic play or Neil’s aesthetic work and Brenda’s brother Ron’s mode of aesthetic engagement: he is only too complacently happy to hear again and again the easy-listening records of Mantovani or the “soft patriotic music” of “his Columbus record” before “rumbling down into that exhilarating, restorative, vitamin-packed sleep” of an athlete (GC 74). Like Libby’s and the adoption agent’s speechless smiles before the Utrillo print, Ron’s sleepiness exemplifies engrained habits of overpersonalized normality that appear beyond the reach of Roth’s normative challenge.

These scenes notably take place in the relatively segregated privacy of domestic dwellings. For in Roth’s hands the public library becomes one of the “new ‘symbols of happiness’” that, as historian Richard Pells explains, John Kenneth Galbraith hoped to see Americans invest in.³¹ Public service institutions like libraries, parks, and mass transit systems could help to counterbalance what Galbraith saw as the American economy’s overemphasis on the private-sector production of goods at the expense of social health. In addition, Roth suggests that the institutional logic of the public library combines public disinterest and subjective particularity, with aesthetic engagement, properly understood and undertaken, serving as his paradigmatic figure of this valued potential. In a 1969 New York Times editorial on the virtues of the Newark Public Library, then under threat of closure, Roth gestures toward this ideal as lived reminiscence: “For a ten-year-old to find he actually can steer himself through tens of thousands of volumes to the very one he wants is not without its satisfactions. Nor did it count for nothing to carry a library card in one’s pocket; to pay a fine; to sit in a strange place, beyond the reach of parent and school, and read whatever one chose, in anonymity and peace.”³² In Goodbye, Columbus Roth enlarges this personal anecdote by reassigning its appeal to virtually anybody—young Jewish men and black boys alike—with a respect for “municipal citizenship” and for “aspiration and curiosity and quiet pleasure, for language, learning, scholarship, intelligence, reason, wit, beauty, and knowledge.”³³ By distinguishing and evaluating modes of aesthetic receptivity and, like the black boy with his pale cement lion, by taunting and taming the specter of normal happiness, Roth manages to push through its dark glass, as it were, and retrieve its underlying normative value.

Notes

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada for funding this project and to Adam Carlson for his superlative research assistance. I wish also to thank Cathy Jurca and Stephen Schryer for their astute comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

1. Philip Roth, Letting Go (New York: Ballantine, 1985 [1962]), 340, 341. Hereafter cited as LG, with page references appearing in the text.

2. Seized by a sudden inspiration to write a poem, Libby manages only to write down and weirdly cobble together famous lines from poems learned in college.

3. Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove, 2006), 463.

4. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, in Novels 1967–72, ed. Ross Miller (New York: Library of America, 2005), 435. A devotee of FDR’s “Four Freedoms,” which Rockwell illustrated to much popular acclaim, Portnoy seems to have in mind one illustration in particular, namely, the freedom from want (466). Rockwell had depicted this freedom as a privatized and thoroughly American affair: a cheery Thanksgiving feast, with family posed agreeably around the supper table while Grandma sets down the platter of roast turkey and Grandpa prepares to carve. Of course, Portnoy himself is another kind of middle-class monstrosity; and, as though not wanting him to have the last word on the Rockwell aesthetic, Roth revisits this scenario decades later in American Pastoral (New York: Vintage, 1997). In voluptuous and ambivalently loving detail, Roth portrays the Swede, who reveres Thanksgiving, as yearning to inhabit a Rockwell picture forever.

5. Cf. Stanley Cavell: “the achievement of human happiness requires not the perennial and fuller satisfaction of our needs as they stand but the examination and transformation of those needs.” Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 4–5. Length restrictions preclude elaboration of the influence of Cavell’s insights on this essay. The same can be said for Robert Kaufman’s account of a constructivist-idealist aesthetics in “What Is Construction, What’s the Aesthetic, What Was Adorno Doing?” in Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter, eds., Aesthetic Subjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 366–96; for Christine Korsgaard’s account of normativity as first-person reflective endorsement in The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and for Andrew Hoberek’s account of Roth’s relation to mid-century institutionalism in The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). For a very different view of Roth’s early view of happiness, see Bernard Rodgers’s book, Philip Roth (Boston: Twayne, 1978). He sees a parallel between Roth’s orientation and Chekhov’s suggestion that “behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him” (171–72).

6. Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 164–65.

7. Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

8. That Roth sought in Letting Go to explore the status of art in the context of this mid-century discourse of happiness was certainly not lost on one of his friends from his Chicago years, on which much of this novel was based. Thomas Rogers, in his own fifties-era Chicago novel, The Pursuit of Happiness (New York: New American Library, 1968), has one character, Jane Kauffman, settle into Roth’s novel while the central character, her boyfriend William Popper, selects Croce’s Aesthetics for bedtime reading (11).

9. Howard Mumford Jones, The Pursuit of Happiness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 131–32. Hereafter cited as PH, with page references in the text.

10. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 70, 71.

11. Similarly viewing America as having traded in its founding documents for a mess of happy pottage, Hannah Arendt, who quotes Jones’s passage on phantoms and delusions in On Revolution (1963), longs for the eighteenth century, when “Americans knew that public freedom consisted in having a share in public business, and that the activities connected with this business by no means constituted a burden … [but rather] a feeling of happiness.” Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 119.

12. Melvin Tumin, “Popular Culture and the Open Society,” in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Free Press, 1957), 554, 551.

13. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 3, and White Collar: The American Middle Classes (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 80.

14. Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 19, 147.

15. Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). 146.

16. Lionel Trilling, “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste,” in The Opposing Self (New York: Viking, 1955), 103; Mark Krupnick, Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986), 110, 98.

17. David Riesman, “The Saving Remnant: An Examination of Character Structure,” in Individualism Reconsidered, and Other Essays (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954), 120.

18. Helen Howe, We Happy Few (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 250, 342. No relation to Irving Howe, Helen Howe was the sister of the eminent Harvard law professor (to whom Howard Mumford Jones dedicated his book) and thus also the aunt of Susan Howe and Fanny Howe.

19. David Riesman, “The Ethics of We Happy Few,” in Selected Essays from Individualism Reconsidered (New York: Doubleday, 1954), 42, 41, 43.

20. Ibid., 45, 30.

21. Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 10. Building on Kant’s ideas of art’s expressive particularity and aesthetic judgment’s purposiveness without a purpose, Altieri aims analogously to redeem reflexive, imaginatively productive, affective experience for its own existential sake (14–16). This is precisely what Libby, redounding as it were aesthetic purposiveness with affective purpose, cannot accomplish.

22. The argument I advance here contrasts with Joseph C. Landis’s. He claims that “what grieves Roth most is the awareness that normalcy has, like a Procrustes’ bed, truncated the range of life, excluding on the one hand the embrace of aspiration, the exhilaration of wonder, and on the other the acceptance of suffering.” Landis, “The Sadness of Philip Roth: An Interim Report,” in Sanford Pinsker, ed., Critical Essays on Philip Roth (Boston: Hall, 1982), 165.

23. Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (New York: Vintage, 1993), 51. Hereafter cited as GC, with page references appearing in the text.

24. The fact that Neil seems not to know the name of the “boy” says less about a possible racist habit of mind that deindividuates male blacks (after all, Neil doesn’t call the boy “boy” to his face) than it does about the limitations, for better and worse, of institutional solicitude. On the one hand, there is only so much Neil as librarian can do to improve the lot of a child from the housing projects; on the other hand, institutional surveillance is checked and the black boy’s privacy is protected by his anonymity.

25. Pells, The Liberal Mind, 222, 228.

26. David Riesman, “Some Observations on Changes in Leisure Attitudes,” in Selected Essays from Individualism Reconsidered, 129–30.

27. Ibid., 145.

28. Ibid., 147.

29. Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 46.

30. Ibid., 45, 218.

31. Pells, The Liberal Mind, 170.

32. Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 176. In a footnote Roth reports that the “vehement” protest against closure led the Newark City Council to rescind the decision (175).

33. Ibid., 176, 175.