The Prague Orgy: The Limits of Roth’s Notebook Form

David Lapadat | Music PhD

3 hours ago

7 min read

Explore: All Philip Roth reading guides and essays

Eva Kalinova is sitting on Nathan Zuckerman’s sofa in New York while her companion describes her misfortunes. She is an actress who has left Czechoslovakia, and she would like him to stop. “I do not care to be an ironical Czech character in an ironical Czech story,” she says.

Her companion, the writer Zdenek Sisovsky, carries on, and Nathan helps him by asking for more. Philip Roth gives The Prague Orgy a promising beginning: three people in a room cannot agree on what should be told, or on whose behalf. The encounters that follow have flashes of this vitality, though the novella as a whole feels insufficiently developed. Its notebook form takes us rapidly from one accomplished performance to the next, leaving a slender manuscript-recovery plot to connect them.

This essay discusses the novella in full, including its ending.

Who gets to finish the story?

Sisovsky introduces Eva as a great Chekhovian actress. He recalls the applause she once received, the parts she played, the persecution that ended her career. She keeps interrupting. Roth places a second, shorter exchange inside Sisovsky’s expansive record: Eva tries to prevent the story from being told while Nathan supplies the questions that help it continue.

Her objections concern a shared private life as well as political persecution. She has lost her country and her profession, but she is also exhausted by living with this particular man. When she speaks Czech, Nathan cannot decide whether she is pleading with Sisovsky, berating him or berating herself. The uncertainty belongs inside a sentence about someone he is watching. We can hear the limits of his access before he travels anywhere.

Eva eventually leaves. Sisovsky stays to drink and offers Nathan a new version of her departure. He is again the person available to explain her. The scene has developed through interruptions, changes of language and an exit; its people have done more than supply contrasting opinions about exile.

The mission grows out of the same conversation. Sisovsky’s father wrote stories in Yiddish, left unpublished when he died. The son describes a writer who might have flourished in America and a terrible death at the hands of the Nazis. Nathan wants to know what became of the manuscripts. They remain in Prague with Olga, the wife Sisovsky left behind, who has reasons to deny him anything he wants.

This is a strong premise because several competing claims converge on the same pages. Sisovsky presents them as a lost literary inheritance; Nathan can help another Jewish writer escape obscurity; Olga possesses something that still binds her absent husband to her. The worth of the stories has to be taken on trust, and the proposed rescue is already entangled with the marriage.

Then a date heading takes us from New York to Prague. The decision to go, the arrangements and the arrival have disappeared into the gap. We find him being told about a party by Bolotka, a theater director barred from his profession. Only after the party does Roth take us back to a visit Nathan made to Bolotka’s room earlier that day. The notebook groups its encounters without supplying a continuous itinerary. Nathan is already pursuing the mission before we have spent much time with him choosing it.

An orgy seen from the sofa

Bolotka advertises the gathering as evidence that repression has improved Czech sex. The house, he says, is bugged; even the police get some pleasure from listening. He promises the best orgies in Europe and girls arriving from distant towns. Nathan finds a less spectacular assortment of guests: older women in raincoats, middle-aged men who look like clerks, a few young men in jeans. He suspects that his guide has been exaggerating for an American visitor.

Later, the evening includes a sexual display, and Olga recounts another encounter in the bathroom. The title has an event to refer to. Its misleading quality, for me, lies in the scale and participation it suggests.

Nathan remains on the sofa, politely listening. “They, silenced, are all mouth. I am only ears—and plans,” he observes. He has become the respectable member of this gathering, a good comic displacement for a writer notorious at home for his sexual fiction. The plans give his listening a purpose: he meets Olga here and arranges to see her again. But the notebook gives us the evening largely as introductions, repartee and stories delivered to him. We keep being told how these people live; we spend much less time watching the complicated relations implied by their stories.

The title led me to expect a more sustained collective frenzy. Roth’s gathering produces a series of controlled turns, often very funny, while the visitor sits ready for the next one. Much of its excess reaches us in reported episodes. The party brings Nathan to the woman holding the manuscripts, but the many lives it sketches remain peripheral to that errand.

What a warning does to the notebook

Roth knew the conditions he was drawing on. In his 2013 account of visiting Prague, he recalled meeting persecuted writers between 1972 and 1977, being followed and having his hotel room bugged. Surveillance is part of Bolotka’s introduction to the party, long before the student’s warning.

Its most effective exaggerations begin inside ordinary exchanges. In Nathan’s hotel room, Olga invents a love scene for the suspected microphone in the chandelier. While demanding declarations of love, she writes him instructions about how clearly and loudly he must speak for the police. Two conversations occupy the same small scene: one is audible to a possible listener, the other is a written explanation of how to perform for him.

Downstairs, a clerk insists on seeing her identity card. Olga retaliates with a lecture on European manners, threatening punishments for rudeness as extravagant as the state’s punishments for dissent. A failure of courtesy supposedly merits a labor camp. Here the absurdity grows from something we can watch: the clerk repeats his regulation while she keeps enlarging the offense he has committed against her. Neither gives the other’s grievance any standing.

The change comes when a student interrupts breakfast to warn Nathan that the authorities are building a case against him. When the student fails to appear at a rendezvous, Nathan supplies three explanations: he has gone home, he has been detained, or he was an agent sent to provoke him. All three remain possible in the notebook. In a café, Olga’s claim that half the population spies on the other half becomes Nathan’s estimate that one of the two waiters probably works for the police.

“Am I getting drastically paranoid or am I getting the idea?” he asks.

Nathan has applied Olga’s extravagant formulation to his own safety. The change is so rapid that the prospect of catastrophe soon has more space and immediacy than the task he came to accomplish. The thin mission has to carry threats of arrest, betrayal, the student’s report of a journalist drowned, the fear of becoming trapped in somebody else’s country. I can follow the mechanism without feeling that the short sequence has developed enough to sustain its full escalation. The notebook’s abruptness begins to hurry the experience it wants us to inhabit.

The bargain becomes a script

By this point, Olga has also contradicted Sisovsky’s story of his father’s death. She says he survived the war and died in a bus accident. Nathan finds this hard to believe; she accuses him of preferring the more horrible story. Their disagreement makes him question the rescue he has imagined. Roth leaves us to assess the interests behind two incompatible stories, with no means of verifying either.

Later, in Olga’s room, their bargaining takes the form of a script, the speakers reduced to O. and Z., with occasional stage directions. Nathan offers money, offers to find her a husband who will take her to America, offers to prevent Sisovsky from appropriating his father’s work. Each proposal gives Olga another opportunity to question his motives.

She calculates the possible rewards and penalties:

O. You get the idealism prize, he gets the royalties, she gets the jewelry, and I get seven years. For the sake of literature.

The neat distribution refers to Nathan, Sisovsky, Eva and herself. Olga makes Nathan answer for the risk she would bear. This is a much stronger use of compression than simply cutting from one anecdote to another. Olga changes what Nathan has to offer; his admiration for her does nothing to meet her demand. She wants him to marry her. He wants the pages.

At last she gives them to him, asking for nothing except that he tell Sisovsky and Eva she asked for nothing. A box for chocolates contains hundreds of pages: thick paper, black ink, neat Yiddish handwriting. Roth briefly lets the manuscript occupy the scene as something held and looked at. Nathan cannot read it. Its excellence remains a claim made by the son who wants it out of Prague.

A section break follows. Within fifteen minutes of Nathan’s return to his hotel, policemen confiscate the box and order him to leave the country. The bargain has taken a long succession of short exchanges; undoing it takes one paragraph. Nathan’s protests now receive the clerk’s courteous explanations of why he must cooperate. The police end a mission he was still trying to justify to himself.

That cut has force, but also brings the manuscript plot to an end just as the object has become tangible. The long drive out, dominated by the culture minister’s defense of compliant writers and obedient citizens, supplies another performance for Nathan to endure. It broadens the political argument without following Olga and the others any further.

As an epilogue, The Prague Orgy moves Nathan’s literary troubles into a country whose writers can be deprived of their profession. Several scenes do this with comic precision. The strongest disputed stories also give us reasons to doubt their tellers. The opening and Olga’s bargaining show how much Roth can develop within a short exchange. Yet I come away wanting more of the decisions and attachments between such encounters—the parts of Nathan’s errand that the notebook hurries past.