Recently, I was assigned by the Los Angeles Sunday Times Book Review to write an essay about Philip Roth in connection with the publication of two volumes of his early writings. The following was deleted from my piece because, I was told, the Times is "a family newspaper":
When I mentioned to comedy writer Dawna Kaufmann a news item that federal health officials were examining rare reports of blindness among some men using the impotence drugs Viagra and Cialis, she responded, "Good, then just give 'em a piece of warm liver, and they won't know the difference." Her comment accentuated the irony that, despite Philp Roth's vast body of work, he still provides a generic joke reference inspired by the novel he began writing in 1967, "Portnoy's Complaint," in which his protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, buys a piece of liver at a butcher shop and masturbates into it behind a billboard on the way to his bar mitzvah lesson, and on another occasion, he returns home from school and borrows from the refrigerator a big purplish piece of raw liver, which he proceeds to roll around his penis in the bathroom, the better to ravish it.
"So," he confesses to a psychiatrist. "Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family's dinner."
There was a rumor that Roth had lifted the onanistically obsessed idea for "Portnoy's Complaint" from a song by the Fugs--a band on the cusp of rock and punk, named after Norman Mailer's euphemism in "The Naked and the Dead"--but this notion was disavowed by Fugs leader Ed Sanders, who assured me, "Philip Roth did not plagiarize a Fugs song. He came to a Fugs show in 1966, and I think he was inspired by Tuli Kupferberg, in top hat and cane, singing 'Jack-Off Blues.' Many times in reunion concerts, introducing Tuli singing that song, I have suggested that Roth got some of the impetus for 'Portnoy's Complaint' from that time he was inspired by the Tuli tune."
Paul Krassner is the publisher of Mad artist Wally Wood's classic parody, the Disneyland Memorial Orgy, available at www.paulkrassner.com