But the schools also inculcated values beyond discipline and grades. Roth recently showed me the eighth-grade graduation program from the Chancellor Avenue School—dated January 30, 1946—which had been sent to him by an old classmate, listing Roth as one of two authors of a play titled Let Freedom Ring! His friend and co-author, Dorothy Brand, had played Tolerance and Roth had played Prejudice (even then, it seems, he had a propensity for the morally darker role), both invisible to the others onstage. In their little drama, Tolerance proposed a series of visits to families of different ethnic backgrounds, and Prejudice piped up with a matching series of insulting (if childish) expectations—something like “Their heads are full of chop suey,” Roth recalls, when a Chinese family was proposed—expectations that would promptly be disproved by the scene the pair visited: the Chinese family, for example, was discovered reading Confucius at the dinner table. At the end, the entire class sang the forties liberal anthem “The House I Live In,” and Roth, as Prejudice, slunk off the stage. In 1946, in Weequahic, this denouement was a better expression of the local creed than anything taught in Hebrew school.
If there was a difficulty with the schools and the educational project into which parents poured their hope, it was that the better the process worked, the more it left the parents behind and strangely foreign to their children. Herman Roth had left school after eighth grade; he provided for his family by means of unremitting labor and a stubborn perseverance that affected his younger son, even in the throes of adolescence, with its mixture of heroism and pathos. Selling insurance policies for Metropolitan Life, Roth rose about as high in the company’s ranks as a Jew was allowed to rise in the thirties and forties, in accord with unofficial but openly practiced quotas and traditions. Philip was hardly unaware of the limitations set upon his father’s career. As for anti-Semitism, he knew about the larger hate-filled American figures such as Father Coughlin and Henry Ford—virtually no one in the neighborhood, he remembers, chose to own a Ford—and he had witnessed several attacks on Jewish kids by local toughs. As a result of one “postgame pogrom,” after Weequahic High won an unlikely football victory against a more favored city team, one of his friends had to be hospitalized. In The Facts, Roth writes that he was twelve when he began to think about becoming a lawyer and working for an organization like the Anti-Defamation League, “to oppose the injustices wreaked by the violent and the privileged.”
Yet the boy’s general experience of anti-Semitism was not of a brutal persecution flowing direct from its Gentile source—the kind of anti-Semitism that had shaped his grandparents’ lives and still echoed in his parents’ minds. More often, he saw the deformations that such persecution had wrought in the older generations of Jews around him: the care in following rules, the need to make a good impression, the fear of stepping out of line and implicating an entire people in one’s disgrace. If his father’s habit of talking to everyone and of “glad-handing” people was embarrassing to him as a child, as Roth recalls in conversation, he eventually recognized in this behavior not merely the ways of a salesman but the desire “to allay anti-Semitism and show everyone he was a nice and regular guy.”
For all that Herman and Bess Roth appeared to be typical first-generation American Jews, however, part of a population that famously put a premium on its sons becoming doctors and lawyers, they were notably sanguine about both of their boys becoming artists. Sandy—Sanford Roth, born in 1927, five years older than Philip—took classes at the Art Students League while still in high school and, after a stint in the navy, studied to be a painter at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn rather than attend college. (In an interview on the Internet series Web of Stories, Roth recounts how he would wonderingly “debrief” his brother when he returned from life drawing class at the Art Students League, where he’d been sitting in a room with an actual naked woman—“of all things, drawing.”) In some ways, Roth says, his parents were simply too unworldly to have pushed their sons in any professional direction. But he also points out that his mother’s beloved brother, Mickey (born Emmanuel), was a painter—unmarried, unsalaried, classically bohemian—whose canvases had pride of place in the Roth household, right along with a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence issued by Metropolitan Life. When Sandy adjusted his goals later on and went into advertising, it was not because of parental pressure but because he had acquired a family of his own to support.
As in many families, the brothers tended to divide up their accomplishments, and Sandy was the handsome one, the neighborhood heartthrob. Philip got the brains and very possibly the charm (and certainly the will) to become his scrupulously fair and loving mother’s secret favorite—or so it always appeared to him, he tells me, and he believes it may have appeared that way to his brother, too, while they were growing up. Skipping a half-year term, twice, to more advanced grades, he was a top student and the family entertainer, a budding stand-up comic with an array of accents and impressions—mostly derived from radio—that kept his parents in stitches. His earliest passion as a reader was for sea adventures, and by the time he was eleven he had decided on a pen name: Eric Duncan (“the hard c’s got me”). He typed out the title page of a sea adventure of his own, Storm Off Hatteras, but didn’t bother with the rest of the book. He was just testing the feeling of being a writer.
During the war years, he was mesmerized by radio news reports and by the politically charged dramas written by Norman Corwin, the poet laureate of radio. He recalls Corwin’s most famous show, On a Note of Triumph, broadcast on V-E Day, as “one of the most thrilling experiences of my childhood.” A lot of Corwin’s impact, Roth says, came from the American place names resounding through his prose: “A kid from Texas barrels through with a grenade to show a Nazi where the limit is!” Roth is improvising, in a broadcaster baritone, to suggest what the experience was like: “A kid from Chattanooga…,” he starts in again. “The names would just wash over me, and I’d think, ‘This is a great country.’” One of the reasons for this geographic infatuation, he says, is simply that “the places were so remote, then. The words were so magical: Chattanooga.” It can’t be irrelevant that the thrill of language first came to this richly colloquial writer in the form of voices, and that these voices included not only the dramatic flights of Norman Corwin’s scripts but Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Fred Allen, and a host of others Roth still laughs about and quotes. The script for On a Note of Triumph, published later in 1945, was the first book that he ever bought.
He was only twelve when he entered high school, and although the books that were assigned in class held no interest at all—he remembers being bored by both Silas Marner and Scaramouche—he was consumed by books about baseball and by the sport itself. As Roth tells it, his high school years were a time of intensely boyish camaraderie. There were girls he liked, and he went on dates; during his last two years, he had a steady girlfriend named Betty Rogow, dark-haired and pretty. Sex was out of the question, of course—“It wouldn’t have dawned on me”—although he assures me that there was plenty of rubbing and feeling and enough necking so that it often felt as if “your lips had fallen off.” (There was, of course, also plenty of training in what Roth refers to as “mastering my small-muscle skills,” or the masturbatory arts; for a while, he says, he was smitten with a cardboard toilet paper roll, its inside smeared with Vaseline.) But the guys were the same friends that he’d been with since grade school—multiplied by three, since he’d moved through three different classes. They played ball, they played blackjack, they went to the movies on Friday nights and spent an hour and a half walking home, falling down laughing, stopping for bagels and eating half a dozen each. (These bagels were not as large, he informs me, as most bagels are today.)
The movies themselves weren’t important. Whatever was playing would do. When he was younger, Sandy had taken him to see the Andy Hardy series, and at twelve he was swept away by State Fair, with its Rodgers and Hammerstein score and its Iowa charms: “You fell in love with a certain picture of America.”
His autograph book from his eighth-grade graduation lists the movie’s hit song, “It Might as Well Be Spring,” as his personal favorite and identifies its source as “the best movie there is.” The little album also proclaims his favorite writer as John Tunis (the author of numerous baseball novels), his future profession as “journalist,” his future college as “Northwestern” (“I knew nothing about it,” he tells me, “I just liked the name”), and his favorite saying as, “Don’t step on the underdog”—all confirming that he was a very good boy not only in his own retrospective account but in the reality of 1946. Three years later, he and his friends lied about their ages to get into Newark’s Little Theater to see the old art film Ecstasy, infamously featuring Hedy Lamarr’s bare breasts, in a scene that lasted, he recalls, about three seconds and that had the Weequahic pack fervently whispering, as the moment approached, “This is it! This is it!”
Books, however, were important, and here, too, America was key to his interests. He became an avid reader of historical novels by Howard Fast, with titles like Citizen Tom Paine. Fast was a member of the Communist Party, and his books, Roth says now, “celebrated American history from a Marxist point of view, but I didn’t know that; I couldn’t ferret out any particular point of view.” It was the dramatization and the personalization of American history that got him. On the other side of seriousness there was Damon Runyon, whom he discovered in the newspaper: “I loved it that his people talked in that crazy way,” he says. Every week, he would bicycle over to the Weequahic branch library and fill his basket with books. And after Sandy enrolled in Pratt, in 1948, he’d come home on weekends and leave his more sophisticated paperbacks scattered around. Once, Sandy brought home an entire summer’s revelatory reading list: Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell. Roth was entering that wonderful period, he says, when “everything matters, and there is no such thing as a bad book.”
There wasn’t enough money for him to go away to college. After the war, Herman Roth had attempted to evade corporate obstacles and enter a brand-new business, frozen foods, working nights and weekends while staying on full-time at Metropolitan Life. He borrowed the money necessary to get the enterprise going, with the result that the family’s savings were wiped out when it failed, while Philip was in high school. He graduated at sixteen, in January 1950, and enrolled in the Newark branch of Rutgers for the following fall. In the meantime, he got a job as a stock clerk in the S. Klein department store in downtown Newark, which required a period of training in the Manhattan flagship store on Union Square, just around the corner from the great used-book shops of Fourth Avenue. “I’d eat lunch right there in the bookstores,” he says. Cheap paperbacks: new joy. He remembers being under the spell of John Dos Passos: “the trains, the strikers, the factories—the contemporary world as fiction.” It was an enthusiasm that briefly helped to determine his career plans when he was fired from S. Klein after just a few weeks for being “a wise guy.”
He wanted to work in a factory. So he got a job in a garage door plant in Irvington, New Jersey, where he sat in a tiny room, sorting nails in giant kegs, from eight in the morning until five. The first lunch hour he found terrific: “There was a softball game, I loved that, the guys, the workers.” It was Dos Passos. It was glamorous. It was another ideal of manly romance. After lunch, however, he went back to sorting nails. He says that at dinner that evening he told his parents that his day had been great and then asked, “Do I have to go back?” He didn’t even bother to collect a paycheck. An unheroic job as a summer camp counselor carried him through until fall.
The Newark branch of Rutgers, where he spent his freshman year, was situated in a former brewery downtown. The place appealed to his “liberal democratic spirit” and, putting him among the city’s non-Jewish students for the first time, provided something new and even exciting. Unlike Neil Klugman in Goodbye Columbus, however, he moved on quickly. Living in the family’s five-room apartment under his father’s watchful eye was painfully constricting. Friction had been building throughout high school: Herman Roth was nothing if not absolutely certain of the way things should be done. “You’re doing it wrong!” was, Roth recalls, his father’s battle cry. (His mother, once her younger son had grown up enough to impress her—and even intimidate her—was just as characteristically given to saying, “Darling, whatever you think is right.”) The experience of his father teaching him to drive, was, Roth tells me, “like the Battle of Iwo Jima”; he finally went to a driving school to preserve the peace.
Now angry fights were breaking out over the hours he kept. His father’s idea of a curfew seemed suitable to a high school boy, and he was a college man. He knew even then that his father, who had seen three of his five brothers die young, was frightened for him; but that didn’t make it any easier—in fact, the sympathy may have made it harder. Once, when he got home after midnight, he found the front door locked and had to bang and bang to be let in (by his mother). He applied to transfer for his sophomore year and managed to win a scholarship to Bucknell University in rural Pennsylvania, a welcome seven hours’ drive away. It was a blessing, he says, mostly because it kept him from having the kind of seriously wounding battle with his father that neither of them wanted.
He would have been happy to go almost anywhere. He had fixed on Bucknell because a high school friend had gone there, and had returned for Christmas break with an enviable air of independence and tales of a girlfriend. But this Baptist-founded college set among cornfields also fulfilled his increasing desire to experience “America”: the non-immigrant, non-ethnic country of the movies and the books and, particularly, of his current literary idol, Thomas Wolfe. The lyric ambition of Look Homeward, Angel and of Wolfe’s other books—Roth had read them all by the time he left for Bucknell—drew him away from the idea of law school and intensified his bond to literature: not so much as beautiful writing, he says (although Wolfe offered that, too), but as an expression of appetite, quest, and freedom. He still calls Wolfe “half a genius.” Writing about this first literary hero more than fifty years later, in some unpublished notes about the writers who affected him in youth, Roth recalls the powerful effect on him of Wolfe’s “raw yearning for an epic existence—an epic American existence.” At Bucknell, he had hopes of finding something like it. Small-town life, ivy-covered buildings, a library with a white steeple and a carillon bell. Fraternities (even if he joined the only Jewish one and resigned after little more than a year). Compulsory chapel attendance (even if he read Schopenhauer in his pew). Roth may have had an all-American childhood, but he had come to suspect that he had never known any real Americans in Newark.
* * *
The stories he wrote at Bucknell were about real Americans, and so he saw no place in them for Jews at all. The elevated precincts of literature were out of bounds for his family and the people he’d known, for the immigrant city where he had grown up. Nor was there a place on Parnassus for comedy, although he was just discovering how raucous and rambunctious a performer he could be, and not only when he played Nathan Detroit in his fraternity’s ten-minute pocket version of Guys and Dolls on frat night. He entertained the young professors who befriended him with outrageous stories of hometown Jewish life, part neighborhood lore and part routines remembered from the comics at Newark’s Empire Burlesque. But this was not anything that he could imagine writing down.
It wasn’t possible to study modern American literature at Bucknell; even the year-long English honors seminar began with Beowulf and ended with T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. (“I was interested in British literature. That’s what literature was.”) The only glimpse he got of anything different was reading the plays of Eugene O’Neill in a class about American theater, which was taught by one of his young professor friends, Bob Maurer. By chance, however, Charlotte Maurer, Bob’s wife, had worked as William Shawn’s secretary at The New Yorker, and Roth got to know her when he and his girlfriend babysat for the couple’s young son. (“The only place you could screw
in those days was on the bed of the professors when you babysat.”)
When he and his pals took over the campus literary magazine—“It was a purge,” he tells me, “a real Khrushchev move”—the Maurers were their advisers, and they modeled it on The New Yorker, including an opening section based on “The Talk of the Town.” (“We were over in Sheboygan the other day…,” he brightly mimics the voice.) The magazine, called Et Cetera, also had plenty of room for what he now calls his “sensitive little stories,” often about tragic youths whose allegorical existence stood for “something like the life of the mind,” as he writes in The Facts. These stories may have reflected some of the cultural and even spiritual displacement that the young author experienced at “football-clothes-car-date-acne-conscious” Bucknell, but they reflected none of the highly unliterary exuberance that he also felt.
Junior year, he came into his own. He was editor of Et Cetera; auditioning for the drama society, he got the leading role that he wrote to his grandmother about. He also received his first recognition “for literary acumen,” as he puts it, when one of his professors, Willard Smith, singled him out for a paper he had written on Thomas Mann’s story Mario and the Magician and asked him to lead a class. Smith’s approval carried weight: he was known to have been at Princeton in the era of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson, and he cut an impressive figure in the first Ivy League–style suits that Roth had ever seen. There was also cause for jubilation on the personal front, when, after two years in college, during which he’d had hardly more sexual experience than at Weequahic High, he won a girlfriend and launched his babysitting career.
Betty Powell—another Betty; it was the era for them—was not the cheerleader type one might have expected. The most sophisticated girl on campus, by Roth’s account, she came from a navy family and had spent part of her childhood in Japan after the war. Frail and blond, she had since then suffered through her parents’ divorce, and her father died of cancer while she was in college. She smoked and drank martinis—often, seductively, both at once—and her mixture of knowingness and vulnerability seems to have been immensely appealing. And she played very hard to get. Roth courted her assiduously, and he can still recall her telling him, “Will you please stop mooning over me?” He found the expression so enchanting—an early sign of the effect on him of women’s language—that he pursued her even harder. (The value of those babysitting jobs was proved the next year, when Betty was discovered in Roth’s off-campus room, hiding under the bed. The only reason the landlady didn’t throw him out, he believes, is that he had not yet paid the month’s rent.)
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 3