'Portnoy's Complaint' By Philip Roth - A Review

I found this in a pile of books left for people to choose from just beyond the check outs of my local supermarket after I'd done my weekly shop. I'd heard of the book, but knew nothing about it beyond that it was understood to be shocking when it was first released, there was film adaptation from 1972, and that Alan Bennett's mother read it when it first came out, knowing nothing about it before she read it.

Bennett in one of his anecdotes explains how he took it upon himself to explain the logic of the writing and the dynamic of the relationships in the book to her, explaining, as I paraphrase it, 'Mam, in this book the authorities have taken sexual hysteria off the ration book'. The government ration book being something that she had lived with between 1940-54 that had made it's mark in every part of her everyday life for years after it ended, and it being something she understood the purpose of at the time it was government policy.

I have also read several books that describe would-be fetish behaviour including the nineteenth century account of the fetish of being submissive, 'Venus in Furs' by Leopold Von Sacher Masoch. In fact I read it twice to understand it better. I too have had my difficulties with the psychology of rationing in my life. When I got 'Portnoy's Complaint' I thought it was book that I would enjoy reading whilst sat at the back of the bus, on journeys between 30 mins and 90 mins long when I could be doing nothing else. It is a brave experiment. Whether I finish the book remains to be seen.

It starts as it means to go on, as an unannounced confession in which the reader seems to be the person confessed to. How funny the reader finds this is depends on whether the reader is okay with taking on the role of unintended confessor, to a character-Alexander Portnoy-who has no obvious interest in any sort psychological resolution, spiritual absolution, or even accepting a logical approach to the easing of his problems. Portnoy is 33 and does a high status job of the city state of New York and lives with his parents, who for him to leave them requires him to marry a female they approve of. His father is a washed out character who sells insurance to black people who don't want it, and his mother wears the trousers in the house.

This is where when Alexander was a teenager he seemed to get caught in this cycle, where his confession becomes.... I think about sex and masturbate all the time, my mother wants me to marry and settle down, if I did marry as she wanted me to then I would not be able to settle down, therefore I think about sex a lot, I masturbate a lot, I sometimes find attractive girls who seem to find me attractive, and they too want to settle down with a husband who works to pay for the home they want to live but they contribute to the maintenance of through how clean and controlled the house is, this makes me change girlfriends often.

From the thoughts about the different girlfriends who the more he gets to know them the more they resemble his mother Portnoy is bounced back round the thought cycle to being confronted/controlled by his mother, repeat and repeat again with minor variations. To modern minds he would be a classic example of a commitment-phobe were his commitment to masturbation not quite so thorough, ongoing, and quite so consistent.

Alexander is helpful enough to his confessor, the reader, to list his fetishes for the first time on page 172 of the book. They are onanism exhibitionism and voyeurism. What he does not add, which might have shortened the book considerably if he had, could have been how for all of his fetishes being different to each other, they all rather neatly dovetail into one set of social actions as they all feed off each other.

Then there is the famous scene with the liver, in which any vegetarian reading the text might feel a certain disgust, but may also absolve themselves of their disgust as they paraphrase the Pharisees prayer, Luke Ch 18 V 11, and say of themselves 'I thank thee Lord I am not as other men (particularly not the young Alex Portnoy)'.

Is the book funny? Clearly yes in one respect, Roth writes Alexander Portnoy's speeches in extended similes and metaphors where the readers realises quite late into reading them that these tortured similes etc are actually jokes where the last part of the simile is the most tortured and extended part of the simile, the punchline of the long disguised joke. At that level the writing is very good, well sustained. But however good the writing is, writing for a character caught up in his own repeating cycle of events, behaviours and responses, much like the character Severin in 'Venus in Furs', does make the character one dimensional and self limiting, and where he is funny the joke is repetitive.

Two thirds of the book read, and Portnoy now has male friends his own age but still the dialogue is at the level of, I don't know-maybe one of the dirtier episodes of Beavis and Butthead, but that is opening out away from the previous accounts of sexual frustration. And still the young women come and go, leaving the reader disgusted and the mind that Alexander Portnoy has to be on one track, which his friends also get locked into when they try to be supportive company for each other.

One third of the book to go. It might be an uphill struggle  but I will finish it.  At the end Alexander Portnoy cannot quite remain the relationship/masturbatory equivalent of Sisyphus condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain only to see it fall to the bottom again, and start to roll the same stone up the mountain again. With no exit from his dilemmas as he continues relive his old traps, whilst half-looking for the way out from them. 

Given the circularity of the plot and of Alex Portnoy's teenage sexual obsessions, and of his sense of perpetual conflict with the (Jewish) faith based adult world that he resists joining, any resolution is going to be a deflation. 

Thus it proves. But how the deflation actually happens I will leave the reader to find out for themselves.

Measuring Heaven?

One of the ways I fail to apprehend
the modern world is when people talk
and write in unqualified superlatives
about the idea of intensity, declaring
that their latest experience of this
and that 'was their best time ever'.

It is a given that certain experiences
don't just have no unit of measurement,
but make it required that rating them
out of five or ten is the nearest
we get to being objective.

Then there is quality of something being immersive,
e.g. when the arrangements and tunes
of a piece of classical music are performed
with enough empathy to please the ear
of the sensitive listener. All that can be asked
is how faithful were the players to the score?
Everything beyond that is beyond measure.     

And wherever Heaven is, it has no units
and is not a place where measuring is apt.  

Bad Alignments

I don't know how to read the present day news cycle,
which, from what it says, does more than recycle
the old human conflicts it says it is 'just reporting'.

These reports add a pointless cruelty into life,
where in reports of wars protagonists of wars
can't hear themselves speak, and won't listen
to how entrenched their enemies have become
in their opposing positions.

And that is just the foreigners who disagree.

There are plenty of folk in my own country
who for being unable to agree with those
who they oppose find the corresponding side
in, from Russia to the USA, to side with
and to underline their domestic position. 

To call such positioning 'a bad alignment'
reproaches it all too lightly, and further
fails to address how such alignments leave us
lacking in inclusivity, polarised, and divided,

Picture Set of The Month - March - Moroccan Star Sand Dunes

Are in the news as natural phenomena that also
appear on Mars and Saturn's biggest moon, Titan. 

Where the base of a star sand dune can be
up to 13,000 years old whilst the peaks
are typically nearer 1000 years old.

A star dune is formed by the wind blowing
in two opposing directions – from the south-west
 and the north-east – leading to the sand building up.

A steady third wind that blows from the east shifts
the dune slowly west at a rate of about 50cm a year.
Please left click here to learn more about this subject.

 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Five - Finding My Way Around

I was thankful the Monday morning that I started work that my work was part time. What I lost in the money I might have earned more if the job were full time but I gained in having more time in which to patch myself into the different businesses and organisations that I was going to be dependent on, to greater or lesser degrees, in Nottingham. The bank, my new doctor, and West Bridgford Council, from whom I had to get the application form for my housing benefit. They were the big three at the top of the list.

Finding where these places were located with a city map took time, finding my way within them also took time. West Bridgford City Hall was not quite like the huge hospitals where new visitors would get lost for having lost their sense of direction, and being blinded by the signs. But like a hospital, so many of corridors looking similar to each other and the signage seeming wilfully obscure. But like many a visitor to a hospital I got a fair amount of  help when I looked slightly lost and there other people about. They spontaneously offered me directions.

With some of the tasks being less urgent than others I was apt to wander round a little, simply to get my bearings by sight. Joining West Bridgford Library was very low on the list of priorities, but the library building was much easier to find than many other buildings, and the process of joining was briefer to complete than for all the other tasks. The library building was a bigger version the library in Gainsborough. Both were fine Andrew Carnegie constructions from the 1920's. West Bridgford library proved to be not just a place for bookish entertainments, but with it's copies of phone books and business directories and other information it was a sign post for many of the places I thought I needed to go. It made many of the journeys I had to go on shorter. It was the second best place to go to. The Citizens Advice Bureau was the first place to go for advice but I did not find out where that was until later.

But the first place to find on the map and get to on the bus was my new employer, The Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home in Lady Bay, West Bridgford. If at some points over the weekend I had doubted the wisdom of moving to Nottingham then the employer was the person to dispel those doubts by putting me to work. The induction was demonstrative whilst being  undemanding. It was partly about becoming familiar with the lay out of the building, partly about how I understood my duties, at meal time towards the patients, and between meals but the most important part was being introduced to the residents out of courtesy to them. I was going to be working a pattern of different daytime shifts where I would be working most in the mornings, with some early afternoon shifts for variety.

This was not my first experience of nursing. If being a volunteer for St John Ambulance counted as nursing experience then that was my first. I was in that from the age of nine to nineteen or so, until I found friends my own age. But I discount that as nursing experience. It was much nearer a junior version of 'Dad's Army', pointless hierarchies and mild incompetence combined so as each disguised and justified the other. Then there was the year I spent as a volunteer of my own volition in Gainsborough's John Coupland hospital, as prelude to thinking I might get nurse training. There I was accepted by the ward nurses, but side lined and underused because I was uninsured. Here I was not only insured to work, but paid as well. Sorting out my banking arrangements for being paid with the head of the home was part of the induction.

This image was taken in 1990
two years after the Ace scheme
placement move, but it is close
enough to what I looked like in the
Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home.  

I liked the uniform but I was not particularly good as a nursing assistant at first. I was prone to impatience. But then this was the first time I was being paid to do something I thought I wanted to do. A lot of the work was slow routine support for people who due to their Parkinson's Disease were slow to act. The biggest part of the work was forcing myself to wait for them to give me their cues to allow me to be helpful, when I did not see and hear easily when I was going to be asked, due to their declining health. Mealtimes were when the cues and patience mattered most, that was when the residents most valued their autonomy. But every daytime activity that was led by the residents also required the same discipline. My impatience was a bad thing for people with Parkinson's disease. People who, depending on their age, health, and vitality, move at fractions of the pace they were once capable of when the Parkinson's was present in them but it not obvious in how they moved. But with practice I learned how to be more patient, within the work schedules that the nursing home ran to.    

Even now, I associate blandness with imminent discomfort. Many of my times that I had to myself in that first few weeks when I was not in work and I had no need to be in the bland house were spent on the buses, getting the lie of the city. I had been to Nottingham three times in the previous decade. Each visit was fleeting and I was a guest of others who was put in the back of a car. The first visit was with a friend to see one of their friends in my CND days. I could have fitted in better that evening than I did. The other two visits were both to the music venue Rock City, first to see Christian band After The Fire, and then to see Bruce Springsteen/Neil Young sides man and solo artist in his own right, Nils Lofgren, with a very different set of friends to CND friends I had. But I had never seen Nottingham during the day and on my own.

I don't know how often I caught different buses and en route took note of the different shops to investigate the next time I was on this route. But for that day I was going to places that I had seen and noted for the first time the last time I took this journey. Church buildings, record shops, second hand book shops and libraries were all of major interest. I was astonished at the floor space of the The Central Library, just off the city centre, it was spread over several floors, records and tapes to take out, as well as more books of interest to me than I could list, much less had the time to read. Library envy is not a feeling I expected to have at that stage of my life, but it was what I felt.

To be directed to Chapter Six please left click here.

 

Is This The Oldest Modern Genocide?

'Circassian Prince at Constantinople' as painted in 1845 by Orientalist American painter Miner Kilbourne Kellogg (1814-1889). The full description of the painting is described as Portrait of Seferbiy Zanoko, Circassian aristocrat, diplomat, and military leader in traditional Circassian costume. Circassia was a small country on the North East shore of the black sea close to Georgia and South Ossetia.

Seferbiy Zaneqo (1798 - 1860) was a Circassian diplomat and military commander and fifth leader of the Circassian Confederation between 1859 and 1860. He took part in the Russo-Circassian War in both a military and a political capacity. As a diplomat he advocated for the Circassian cause in the west, and acted as an emissary of the Ottoman Empire in the region. By the end of his life Zaneqo was the leader of the Circassian resistance.

Between 1763 and 1864 Circassia was at war with the Russian Empire. Between 1800 and 1864 the Russians overran Circassia, and committed genocide on it's Muslim population. Georgia is the only country in the world to still classify what the Russians did to the Circassians as a genocide.

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Four - Mismatched Living

The weekend felt very odd. All I had, and all evidently was materially/socially, was in a pile out of direct view in this show house which now housed me, but in which I felt did not fit. The tenant/landlord relationship felt as new as the show house in which it was starting. As far as I could see everything was too shiny for comfort. My past, when I lived in it, had seemed to me to be much poorer materially, but much richer in connectivity. But in the light of the wealth and modernity that now surrounded me my life, as evidenced from what I had brought with me seemed worn out and tatty.

If I had been better organised before I left then I would have an address for Richard whom I had not seen might since that October meeting. But in October  he  seemed  quietly resistant about copying that detail down for me. But no, in the Gainsborough I had come  from, what seemed like friendship seemed easy bt evasive.  With  youth  unemployment  at high  levels young men had more time on their hands than they had money. With the time it was easy to get to know something about other young men using only first names  and  knowing  where they lived by sight, rather than the name and number of the street they lived on. We found it natural to avoid our family background because our families thought we had all  turned  out wrong again for us not being married off, not having full time well paid jobs, and not having a mortgage and our own house to live in and keep other people out of.     

My only company was Mike, who each time he passed me looking at the piles of what I had brought with me whilst thinking what to do next with it all made sort-of-funny but unhelpful comments. My weekend felt more like a very weak end. He was polite towards me, but was distant, making it clear that for him distance was the point. When he drove to join his family for Sunday lunch I was more relieved than guilty at how connecting with him now seemed so difficult. I can see more clearly now what I could not see then; that Mike had taken me at face value when first saw me, because as a landlord he was much nearer being the student he was before he became a property owner. I realised that when I first met and talked to him in the November I had door-stepped him, unaware that that was what I was doing. Even as he  had only recently changed from being  a student  into a property owner, his idea of being a student  was  always  far  better  supported  than  any  idea about any sort of life, as was witnessed by his comments. It did not help that I could not find a single book in the house with which to talk to him as more of an equal. Even my dad, who I generally thought little of, kept a small pile of paper backs of cowboy stories that he liked next to his armchair. There was not even a recipe book in the  house.  A house with no books, no house plants, and definitely not any animals in  it is surely defines the idea of an empty bachelor pad.

As I looked over the pile and slowly moved parts of it into my room, to be tidy, Mike would make passing comments if he was about. His most perceptive comment was in reply to something I said and have long since forgotten. His comment was about how our first thoughts are not always our best thoughts. His lack of curiosity was clear, along with how he had never met anyone who had built their life out of enduring long term unemployment or living on low pay when working. He was right about first thoughts, though. I could say nothing about how I could not get my head around how I was now having to learn to relate to somebody nearly the same age as me, but whose main interest in life was his work and it was a job that made him detached sufficient to bar him from having anything that resembled personal enthusiasm. I had got myself into being the tenant in a shared house with a landlord whose main enthusiasm was making enough money to live in impersonal secure comfort. If I could work out what and who was I could not work why I'd chosen to co-habit in such a situation.

I don't know when I became aware that my new choice of abode was a mistake. Nor do I know when it became clear to me that my past life was much more of a mess than the lives of the people I met in Nottingham. My first clue came to me with the moving of all my stuff that weekend. Mike looked and walked like a man who did not just wore a suit to work, the suit wore him, He looked uncomfortable not wearing a suit. His casuals at weekends were a white shirt, clean jeans and smart shoes. Whereas if there was a dominant theme with my clothing the phrase 'army surplus chic' would describe it best. For coats I had one suit jacket which I was proud of it partly because the label at the neck said 'made in Scunthorpe', a leather jacket on which the central back panel had survived being painted with white gloss paint which made it quite distinctive, a great coat for which the weather was much too warm nearly all year round which I kept because I liked the look of it, One type of jacket I did not have was denim jackets-I had a complete blind spot about them. My favourite everyday jacket was a light army jacket with lots of pockets, and to go with it I had a small canvas army shoulder bag. If the bag itself was small then it was a good place in which to put carrier bags when I shopped for food. My choice of shirts was ex-German Democratic Republic army shirts with the flag of the GDR at the top of the arm where from top to bottom the three stripes were black red and yellow, where the message the colours conveyed was the phrase 'through the night and the blood comes the light'. finally there were several pairs of air wear shoes worn to varying degrees, which were charity shop purchases which had been donated with wear left in them by delivery men, employees of The Post Office.

I disliked army-style 'camouflage' trousers, they seemed pretentious. If I had reasons to disguise myself then they disguised themselves from me. I had one pair of plain green army trousers with the extra side pockets in them to my name. My favoured everyday trousers were ordinary jeans, which I bought in charity shops, where if a got less wear out of them than if I'd bought new they still 'paid for themselves', with the wear I did get out of them. The jeans were usually topped off with the thick leather belt with the movable Fascist Spain belt buckle.

In the middle class West Bridgford that I had landed in, I was slow to understand the logic of detachment where charity shops were for giving to, not buying from. In the trouser department my prize possession was a pair of wide flared jeans that had been only just past being the height of fashion for me, when I first got them ten years earlier, Where they had become worn they had been patched, several times. The method of the patching being to cover the patch I was going to apply with copydex rubber glue, slap it flat over where the cloth of the jeans had thinned, and putting paper over the jeans in case of leaks, iron them both sides where the patch was applied, to heat the glue to make it adhere better. 

As I looked at these jeans I had no idea what was going to make me adhere to the life that was available to me in West Bridgford,

To be directed to Chapter Five please left click here.