Below I present you with the first paragraph of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral —a book that creates its main character and its theme only to undermine both.
The paragraph is a gift to a close reader because it enacts all this creating and undermining within its own short compass. Conceivably, you could savor just that paragraph, claim you’d read the whole book, and walk away with a good conscience. But you wouldn’t want to do that. For while this paragraph is virtuosic, the rest of the book is pretty great too. And nothing needs more undermining than the thing Roth calls “American Pastoral.”
Here’s the paragraph:
The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov.
From little acorns mighty oak trees grow. Our acorn is “The Swede.” Alone and aloof at the beginning of the paragraph, disdainful of verb or modifiers, it is its own statement, its own paragraph, its own novel. It is also a charm, an open sesame at whose utterance every subsequent word in American Pastoral emerges, not haphazardly, as in a quickly exhausted froth, but with the swift, meticulous precision of skilled hands piecing tanned animal hides together into fine ladies’ gloves, the construction of which is described in loving detail later in the novel—the gloves that secure the Swede’s fortunes and enable him to conceive, plan, and enter the fairyland of the American Pastoral.
But hold on! “The Swede,” did I say? WHAT “Swede”? The speaker has intoned that word or phrase as if we already knew whom he’s talking about, as if we’ve already become servants of the magic seemingly contained within it.
Well, admit it. We are, or at least I am, with the intoning of that name, already a servant of the magic. Proof of my submission is that I’m already reading on to see what the magic word “The Swede” unlocks.
I note right away how I’m propelled by that name as if across a swaying footbridge, one leading me from the magical name to a magical face, both attached now to same person. A person who as I soon see him bears yet another name, not magical like the first yet still somehow momentous, though maybe just by its juxtaposition to the first. This other, second name: “Seymour Irving Levov.”
Fortunately, I’m not so dizzy that I can’t notice the stitching of the connecting cables below me as I launch across them from one name to another. Take, for example, the first true sentence in the book, the one beginning “During the war years….” We don’t get, as we might expect, an immediate translation of “the Swede” into other magical phrases. Nor a lengthy glorification of “the Swede” by an omniscient third person narrator. No. We get instead the matter-of-fact voice of someone who actually grew up in the same Jewish neighborhood in 1940s Newark as the magical Swede. A speaker seemingly younger than the Swede, yet not reporting on the awestruck memories of his own presumably hero-worshiping younger self, but instead on the effect the magic had on his and the Swede’s elders.
Think of it this way, the speaker subtly prods us. These elders had been immigrants a generation previously, eking a living in a New York City slum, and prior to that, refugees from vanished European cities and populations. Now, though, their transformation from ghosts, from the dregs of the earth, from members of an obscure tribe into real Americans rising in pursuit of the American Dream is almost complete.
But at the height of their ascent the narrator performs the first of his underminings, a gentle one. The elders were “not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete.” As if to say: Is this the height of their striving? The opportunity to be “bowled over”—and by a mere high school athlete? When they had none of them ever previously considered such a thing as worthy of adult notice? Was it for this that they had abandoned their countries of origin, endured the sorrows of loss and the pain of impoverishment, finally reaching safe shores only to discover that the “flawless” works they were now expected to produce were not ladies’ gloves but baseball players?
The effect isn’t devastating so much as farcical. After all, kids like the kid the narrator was at the time—a kid looking up to this older phenomenon (someone whom we learn later starred in all the quintessential American sports, football, basketball, and, in the 1940s, the king among them, baseball)—for such a kid, the Swede must indeed have been the answer to any real American boy’s dreams, the embodiment to all his longings for identity and belonging.
But in the paragraph’s final sentence, the undermining goes deeper, so much so that it creates a chasm it takes a whole book to fill.
We begin slowly, rhetorically, in high diction: “Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school…” Pause, as we solemnly scan yellowed yearbook pages, comparing and contrasting the brightness of faces. But we find no actual face! For behold, “none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov.” Without warning we’ve moved from a dry examination of mere ethnic facial types to a state of fearful awe, not in salaam before a human being, but before a mask, a projection, a symbol of the masterful Aryan Other, a fantastic embodiment that is at once colossal in size (“steep-jawed”) and chillingly mindless (“insentient”). But which also, in a change of diction into plain old American slang that only Roth could bring off, embodies “this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe….” The repeated b’s seem to dispel all fear, deflate the mask even at the height of its terror. The Swede’s a regular guy after all! And cute! Especially lying there, at the end of the sentence, swaddled as if for his bris, “as Seymour Irving Levov.”
You may be stronger than I. You may be able to resist the temptation to read further, to follow this improbably two-headed monster, The Swede and Seymour Irving Levov, as he stumbles into the American Pastoral—the physical realization in success, acclaim, wealth, property, and only God knows what else, of the American Dream. You may be stronger, but you won’t have as much fun.
After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.
