Portnoy’s Complaint, published in 1969, made Philip Roth famous much as The Adventures of Augie March, published in 1953, made Saul Bellow famous. Augie, born in Chicago, represents the (then) American “everyman,” an individual struggling to make sense of and succeed despite his lack of breeding and culture. If Portnoy was an everyman (an archetypical ordinary individual), too, the average person in 1969 did not admit to it.
Nevertheless, the novel’s title became a shorthand for any form of now-admitted-to-be-common conflict in which ethical impulses instilled by humans perpetually war with intemperate sexual longings. However, the book is still considered by some to be “dirty” and people choosing to read such “filth” have been purportedly advised by the puritanical to wash their hands after doing so. (The possibility that Portnoy’s story was Roth’s personal story, too, has for more than 45 years titillated readers and critics.)
But what I am really writing about today is a poignant paragraph from “Useful Fictions,” a section of My Life As a Man, written by Roth and published in 1970. "Everything that was a part of getting older seemed to me to be a pleasure: the independence and authority, of course, but no less so the refinement and strengthening of one’s moral nature—to be magnanimous where one had been selfish and carping, to be forgiving—where one had been resentful, to be patient where one had been impetuous, to be generous and helpful where one had previously been needful."
We shouldn’t assume that it’s Roth’s personal story; after all, the book jacket describes it as “a fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful and harrowing meditations . . .” Nonetheless, we are drawn to the description of the pleasures of autonomous personhood.
In general, science tells us that at the heart of nature is impersonality. Despite poetry, we live every day in the face of the universe’s [benign] indifference to us—these fabulous creatures, “up from the assertive creeping crawling-out-of-the-primordial-mud-now-walking blind experience of existence."
Each of us is born to the compulsive immediacy that inheres in nature-in-the-raw. We live at its unbridled default effect until we contemplate the higher range of normative aims and ideals and choose in their light to negotiate the force fields in which we find ourselves.
The potential range of systemic intelligence in human nature is vast. To a significant extent, we can—with incremental, systematic and repetitive active and deliberative practice—build the refined mind and meanings with which we wish to engage the world.
Retreat Workshop coming in Newport Beach, June 27th-30th. Registration closes June 17th. Call now if you’re interested. 212-481-9194.
Read more: a 30-year perspective on this experiment in Autonomy and Life.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.