Beyond the Pale

The Worst Man in Literature

Beyond the Pale: The Worst Man in Literature

Readers are strangely proprietorial about the depraved Mickey Sabbath, the hero, anti-hero and villain of Philip Roth’s 1995 tour de force, Sabbath’s Theatre. Just what he does to deserve this affection over the course of 450 bile-filled pages is hard to fathom. He virtually defines that bête noire of creative writing courses, the Unsympathetic Character, and to discover such a monstrous creation on the page is a shock. Yet it is also a sweetly subversive experience - and this perhaps partially explains his appeal.

Here is a baddie with scale, mythical in his magnification. And yet he is no Pilate or Iago, merely a sad old man with a hard-on, raging against the dying of the light. Just as with Macbeth, the more flagrant Sabbath’s transgressions, the more we are dazzled by his outrageous glare. He’s a supernova of sin, or a Roman candle, at the very least, blazing away in Roth’s virtuoso paragraphs; blinding us with his astonishing misogyny, his exponential misanthropy, his audacious nihilism. How does Roth pull it off? (The expression is apt.) Or more accurately, how does he pull it off and still make us care?

For those not familiar with the novel, Sabbath is a puppeteer and disgraced academic in mourning for the death of his libidinous mistress, Drenka, “a conventional woman who would do anything”. Her enthusiasm was convenient, as Sabbath had decided to defy his own imminent demise by attempting to have as much sex as possible. As the book begins, Sabbath finds himself “six short years from seventy”, with “the game just about over”. He’s an old goat in rut, running from the void; he is also a man in perpetual crisis. In crisis over whether he’s a man or not. In crisis as to whether he ever recovered from his brother’s death in World War Two. In crisis over whether he can face his own death, or the defeat that comes before death: impotence. And not just sexual, but rhetorical impotence; the detumescence of voice, of verbal reach in the world. As one turns the pages, increasingly shaking one’s head in dismay, it’s clear that Mickey Sabbath is determined to have his say in full.

It’s clear, too, that Sabbath’s qualifications as a villain are many and varied. A sexual extremist and erotomaniac, he is also a sociopath extraordinaire. And a borderline paedeophile, if his rummaging in the knicker drawer of his best friend’s teenage daughter is anything to go by. A habitual liar, a graveyard onanist, a childless despiser of families and couples; a joyous micturator over all laughter, hope, goodness and wholesomeness (a peculiarly American obsession: see also David Lynch), Sabbath staggers us with his negativity.

And yet . . . and yet. Aren’t his hysterical riffs on death dangerously close to how we all feel when facing up to the Grim Reaper? If one can get past the notorious 20-page transcription of phone sex with his student (recording in shameful detail an act that divests him of his university tenure), isn’t Sabbath just telling it like it is? Indeed, early on, we discover that “Sabbath was a realist, ferociously a realist”. He is in a blind fury at “everything that was going”. Perhaps, the book suggests, we should be too. At the end of his life, Sabbath merely wants “more disastrous entanglement in everything”. And Roth’s looping, adventurous, syntactically dazzling sentences reinforce this. They perfectly convey Sabbath’s constant pushing at what’s permissible. And it’s not just the male protagonists of late Roth who gain from this magnification. The author’s sanctioned biographer, Claudia Roth Pierpont, comments that Drenka “enlarges the sense of female possibility, and that’s what heroines are for”. Of course, Roth rather ruins this reverence by having Sabbath masturbate on her grave (and he’s not the only character who does), but then someone always has to spoil things.

So why do we put up with him? (Sabbath, not Roth.) Are we just drawn by the villainous; those cynosures of evil such as Shakespeare’s Claudius or Dickens’s Bill Sikes? Interestingly, Dickens, writing pre-Freud, at least tempered his baddies with the suggestion that something bad was done to them in turn, early on. But this is not an option Roth explores. Sabbath is motiveless in his malignity, and the daily beauty of those around him makes him revel in his own ugliness. Maybe the reason we protect Sabbath from final censure is that he is so obviously a man afraid. As afraid as we are, in the face of an inevitable void.

The essay first appeared the Guardian