There was never any secret about it: The title of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint is a pun. Kingsley Amis, in Haper's Magazine, April 1969, observes:
...of course, the title is a pun, and the book is a complaint against this and that much more than an account of a complaint in the psyche or anywhere else.
Of course it is. It is a complaint against (read "protest") as much as it is a complaint (read "sickness"), a clear statement of which appears between the title page and the text:
Portnoy's Complaint ...A disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature...
We cannot miss the pun. But complaint has a third meaning. And in this third meaning lie the delight, the humor, and the grace of this book.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists among its definitions of complaint, "a plaintive poem, a plaint." The earliest occurrence of the word is from 1368, Chaucer's "Compleynte of Pité." In the "Franklyn's Tale" of 1386, Chaucer talks of the Franklyn's wife alone, at home, while her husband travels in England. "She moorneth, waketh, wayleth, fasteth, pleyneth;/Desir of his presence hire so distreyneth."1 Among her activities she "pleyneth;" Chaucer uses the verb to suggest a sad song of love in the absence of a lover. F.N. Robinson, in his introduction to Chaucer's Short Poems, observes that "the theme of love-poetry, from antiquity down, has often been the sorrow or grievance of the unaccepted lover, and this sentiment found natural expression in the complaint...the poet speaks in the first person and appears to be the lover."
Such a complaint is Surrey's "Complaint of a Lover Refused" (1557), in which the rebuffed lover "laments the unresponsiveness of his mistress."
Love, that doth reign and live within my thought,
And build his seat within my captive breast,
Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought,
Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.
But she that taught me love, and suffer pain,
My doubtful hope and eke my hot desire
With shamefast look to shadow and refrain,
Her smiling grace converteth straight to ire.
And coward Love then to the heart apace
Taketh his flight, where he doth lurk and plain,
His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.
For my lord's guilt thus faultless bide I pain.
Yet from rny lord shall not my foot remove;
Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.
This "complaint" takes the form of a sonnet, a formalized vehicle: 14 lines, a strict rhyme scheme, usually in iambic pentameter, as is this one. But that it is a complaint merely suggests that the speaker is "love sick," that he seeks relief from his distress. And it is here that the sickness and the lament and the song all blend.
In Portnoy, whatever its surface appearance, the language is stylized. Roth says of it that the book "is a highly stylized confession...that bears about as much resemblance to the drift and tone of what a real psychopathologist hears in his everyday life as a love sonnet does to the iambs and dactyls that lovers whisper into one another's ears..." And while the "complaint" as sickness and lament is immediately evident, the song requires real listening.
The book takes the form of a monologue sung by a distracted male who "speaks in the first person and appears to be the lover." Lover to whom, how and why are questions that echo through the book. But a lover he is.
That it is musical is suggested by the many uses of music. Rhyme is the most obvious. In his fascination with his mother, Alex quotes from her yearbook:
Sophie Ginsky the boys called "Red,"
She'll go far with her big, brown eyes and her clever head.
Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam,
We're the boys that eat no ham.
We play football, we play soccer--
And we keep matzohs in our locker!
Aye, aye,aye, Weequahic High!
and
White bread, rye bread,
Pumpernickel, challah,
All those for Weequahic,
Stand up and hollah!
He is inspired by his hero, Norman Corwin and his celebration of V-E Day, On A Note of Triumph. He thrills to its music. ""Just the rhythm can cause my flesh to ripple, like the beat of the marching song of the victorious Red Army..."
He is a child of the Second World War; he knows all the service hymns: "The Marine Hymn," "The Caissons Go Rolling Along," "The Song of the Army Air Corps," the Song of the Navy Air Corp. "I can even sing you the song of the Seabees," Alex says proudly.
But it's not just the simple rhythms and rhymes of school cheers and popular songs that Alex invokes. He sings sophisticated poetry. He and the first of his three shiksas, the Monkey, drive towards Lake Champlain. On an impulse, the Monkey asks Alex to pull over so that she can perform fellatio. He does; she does. And in the relax time following, he recites his "dirty poem" to her: Yeats' "Leda and the Swan." The Monkey is puzzled by it. But on repetition, the Monkey "takes hold of my hand, draws my fingers up between her legs..."Feel. It made my pussy all wet."
"Sweetheart! You understood the poem!"
"I s'pose I deed," cries Scarlett O'Hara. Then, "Hey, I did! I understood a poem!"
More subtle is the melodiousness of the monologue. A shriek, yes. But that it shares anything with music/poetry is hard put for most to sense. Noise is irregular; music has a pattern, a regularity of pitch, of phrase length, of volume. Portnoy, after all, is talking to his psychiatrist. "I'll sing you a song," he says to Spielvogel. But his "song" is hardly the sweet, melifluous sound of Wyatt or Surrey. "Enough being a nice Jewish boy," he wails," publicly pleasing my parents (beat) while privately pulling my putz (beat)"
If we do not recognize the poetic music of this passage, it's because we are put off by its content, not for lack of its music. In the repetitive plosive [P] there is alliteration. Furthermore, the parallelism of the adverb-participle-noun sequence is apparent (publicly/privately, pleasing/pulling, parents/putz.) The contrast of public and private activity is underlined by the contrast between parents and putz. The rhythm is simple: dactylic trimeter, the last foot of each line truncated. Finally, the choice of the word putz is necessary. Try substituting prick, another one-syllable word beginning with the same sound and with the same denotation. All the overtones are wrong. Putz, a Yiddish word, is soft and unthreatening. Its non-Yiddish cousin has an edge to it; it pierces, wounds, draws blood. It's like calling a young boy "a pisser" rather than "a pisher." Putz is to prick as pisher is to pisser.
Roth revels in repetition. The plosive p's in the selection above are, perhaps, a dramatic example. But alliteration comes easily to Roth. The Monkey's "favorite line of English prose," says Portnoy, is "Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint." There are five feet in this expression; three of them downbeats with an [F] sound. The alliteration and the rhythm reinforce each other.
Alex remarks to Dr. Spielvogel that Jewish parents make their little boys believe that they are "...brilliant like nobody has ever been brilliant and beautiful before..." And still later, he describes himself as "a brainy, balding, beaky Jew, with a strong social conscience and black hair on his balls." Palpitating in Bubbles Girardi's kitchen, he sees a picture of Jesus above the sink and labels him "the Pansy of Palestine. In a pageboy haircut with a Palmolive complexion." So Roth uses alliteration and rhythm to produce the "song" he sings to his psychiatrist.
Alexander Portnoy is angry. He rails against being shoved into the Jewish box, where everything is categorized as Jewish or goyische (his spelling). "It turns out that there is just a little bit more to existence than what can be contained in those disgusting and useless categories," he screams. And then his diction shifts into a quasi-liturgical mode. Roth deliberately uses a phrase identified with praise of God: "he-who".
While the prayerbook says:
"Blessed art Thou, o Lord, our God, who has sanctified us with thy commandments..."
...instead of crying over he-who refuses at the age of fourteen ever to set foot inside a synagogue again...instead of wailing for he-who has turned his back on the saga of his peopleweep for your own pathetic selves, why don't you,sucking and sucking on that sour grape of a religion!
Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew!
It is coming out of my ears already,
The saga of the suffering Jews!
Do me a favor, my people,
and stick your suffering heritage
Up your suffering ass ––
I happen also to be a human being!
This is the song of songs that is Portnoy's.
But if the scoffer in Portnoy makes use of Judaism's liturgy to express his anger, he also uses it to deal with his fear. In the hospital, his mother awaits the results of a biopsy. And he ruminates:
...that word that sounds to my ear like Hebrew, like b'nai or boruch -- benign! Benign! Boruch atoh Adonai, let it be benign! Blessed art thou, O Lord Our God, let it be benign! Hear O Israel, and shine down thy contenance, and the Lord is one, and honor thy father, and honor thy mother, and I will I will I promise I will --only let it be benign.
It is a song, a poem, a plaint. It is certainly not a novel or an autobiography. Roth, himself, talks about this book as "chunks of material of varying shapes and sizes piled upon one another and held together by association rather than chronology."It is a "psychoanalytic monologue." The reader knows nothing of the circumstances of the meeting between Alexander and Dr. Spielvogel: where the doctor's office is, why Alex has gone there or when, how much the doctor charges, etc., any of the real and practical elements of the novel or biography. There is no plot; no character development; hardly even a theme. We hear the voice only of one person, Alex.
Almost at the final page, after he has failed in Israel to erect his own monument, after he has sung " 'Im-po-tent in Is-rael, da, da daah' " to the tune of "Lullabye in Birdland," Alexander Portnoy begins to hear his own voice; He says "maybe what I need most of all, to howl. A pure howl, without any more words between me and it."
Perhaps he is alluding to another singer who mourned the loss of his mother, Alan Ginsburg, in his own memorable Kaddish and who sang the dirge of America in his 1956 poem Howl.
Whatever overtones this monologue stimulates, Roth speaks with his own voice. Brendan Gill, in his 1969 New Yorker review of the book concludes: "Portnoy's Complaint is Roth's scream, and from now on, whenever he screams, it will have the sound of song."
Well, maybe. After 18 subsequent books, the scream is still heard. Alexander Portnoy has reappeared as Nathan Zuckerman, Peter Tarnopol, David Kepesh, even perhaps as Philip Roth. Yet not one of them sings with the voice of Portnoy. None of these super-stern anti-heroes could give us Sadie's litany for Alex:
Mr. Hot-Under-The-Collar
Mr. Hit-The-Ceiling
Mr. Fly-Off-The-Handle
Mr. Always-Right-And-Never-Wrong
"In a complaint, which usually takes the form of a monologue, the poet commonly explains his sad mood, describes the causes of it, discusses possible remedies, or appeals to some lady or divinity for help from his distress."
That is a simple-enough definition for a college literature handbook. But Portnoy has no such simple set of emotions as to let him enjoy a "sad mood." Bi-Polar might better suggest its complexity and the difficulty of describing its causes. The divinity to whom he appeals, Dr. Spielvogel, can only in the final line hint at the existence of "possible remedies."
So while Roth has selected a Rennaisance convention to express Portnoy's attempts to sort himself out, the convention proves inadequate. It is too simple in too complex an environment; it is too subtle for our blatant tastes. We no longer sing ballads like the "Twa Corbies" while strumming a lute.We no longer hear phrases like "she taught me love" and "my hot desire." Now the songs electrify as the shock of electricity shapes their forms and delivery. Now four-letter words are common parlance. Portnoy screams, for he has a microphone held close to his mouth. All his music is amplified, his pain exaggerated. And it is not fourteen lines but 274 pages that he needs finally to allow Dr. Spielvogel his "punch line":
"So. Now vee may perhaps to begin, yes?"
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