LETTER: Three Typed Letters Signed to Asher on Philip Roth, with related material.
Ozick on Philip Roth’s The Breast:
“Hooray for Philip Roth, Unexpected Feminist!”
Ozick, Cynthia. Three typed letters signed “Cynthia,” to Aaron Asher; June 16, June 19, and October 5th, 1972.
Three leaves of typing paper; creased. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Together with:
Bellow, Saul. Typed letter signed, “Saul,” to Aaron Asher; n.d.
One half-leaf of typing paper.
Ozick writes two effusive letters to Asher, Philip Roth’s editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, about Roth’s forthcoming novella, The Breast; which had been sent to her in typescript for early comment.
Ozick notes that she wrote the first letter at 2 a.m., immediately after reading Roth’s book. She expresses her joy in receiving and reading Roth’s typescript; and she describes it as, “all hilarious, serious, visionary, logical, sexual-philosophical; the ending amazes – the joke takes three steps beyond savagery and satire and turns it into a sublimeness of pity. A terrifically unbalancing switch: what does that?” She goes on to say the book, “equalizes sanity and madness, just as it equalizes male and female sexuality, the nipple and the penis, total privacy and total exposure, imagination and incarceration. Ingenuity! Hegelian meshugas!” She further analyzes it:
The breast carries on a lot about his distinctiveness as a personality, but really he doesn’t care much whether he’s a nipple or a penis, as long as he gets rubbed…oh God, this is already getting to sound like a term paper. – But I bet the Woman’s Movement will like this book…after all, it says, stimulation is stimulation. It obliterates active/passive roles. Hooray for Philip Roth, Unexpected Feminist! …Thanks for sending the manuscript. Getting it was an Event, reading it was noisy with pleasure. One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture.
Two days later, she writes Asher again to tell him that “[The Breast] just goes on playing itself, and I can’t stop thinking about it,” and that she’s lent the book to her husband to read. She sharpens and elaborates on her previous assessment:
But what makes me keep on swimming with it, two days after, is the perfection of form. The ultimate logic of it. Like Zeus turning into a swan in order to screw Leda: that’s what being Zeus means, Zeus can be anything. Ani m’amin b’emunah in Science, and, once given that, everything is incontrovertible and the metaphor is unassailable. And the idea is so brilliant, so really and truly genius-crazy…that the book ought to be kept out of the hands of every writer in America, because reading it is just too damn discouraging: with that sort of brain around, why bother?
Bellow’s letter, too, addresses The Breast; apparently, he was sent an advance copy by Asher for review, but he was inundated with other work. He managed to provide Asher with a three-sentence blurb adding, “use this as you see fit, including not at all. If it seems facetious, burn it.” It reads: “After Portnoy, what?/Or Where? Down? No, up; but not the nose – Gogol’s organ. Roughly in between: the breast, like no other in nature or art. Roth’s The Breast is more than a pleasure; it’s a mechaieh. The thought of a sequel makes the blood run cold.”
Also included here is a leaf, lightly annotated in black marker and docketed “file,” titled, “Roth Quotes,” which prints several writers’ comments on The Breast, including Ozick’s; her statement was culled from the letters she wrote to Asher. It reads:
I naturally stopped here and there to howl. One always does this with Philip Roth; he’s the only writer who makes you laugh out loud. The idea is so brilliant, so really and truly genius-crazy that the book ought to be kept out of the hands of every writer in America, because reading it is just too damn discouraging: with that sort of brain around, why bother? It’s all hilarious, serious, visionary, logical, sexual-philosophical; the ending amazes – the joke takes three
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