My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

  In the second semester of that—no other word will do; if it smacks of soap opera, that is not unintentional—of that fateful year, I was asked if I should like to teach, in addition to my regular program, the night course in “Creative Writing” in the downtown division of the university, a single session each Monday night running for three consecutive hours, at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars for the semester. Another windfall it seemed to me—my round-trip tourist-class fare on the Rotterdam. As for the students, they were barely versed in the rules of syntax and spelling, and so, I discovered, hardly able to make head or tail of the heady introductory lecture that, with characteristic thoroughness, I had prepared over a period of a week for delivery at our first meeting. Entitled “The Strategies and Intentions of Fiction,” it was replete with lengthy (and I had thought) “salient” quotations from Aristotle’s Poetics, Flaubert’s correspondence, Dostoevsky’s diaries, and James’s critical prefaces—I quoted only from masters, pointed only to monuments: Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Ambassadors, Madame Bovary, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Sound and the Fury. “ ‘What seems to me the highest and most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does— that is, fill us with wonderment. The most beautiful works have indeed this quality. They are serene in aspect, incomprehensible…pitiless.’” Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Colet (“1853,” I told them, in responsible scholarly fashion, “a year into the writing of Madame Bovary”). “‘The house of fiction has in short not one window but a million…every one of which is pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will…’ ” James, the preface to The Portrait of a Lady. I concluded with a lengthy reading from Conrad’s inspirational introduction to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897): “ ‘…the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities—like the vulnerable body within a steel armor. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring—and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition— and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn…’”

  When I finished reading my twenty-five pages and asked for questions, there was to my surprise and disappointment, just one; as it was the only Negro in the class who had her hand raised, I wondered if it could be that after all I had said she was going to tell me she was offended by the tide of Conrad’s novel. I was already preparing an explanation that might turn her touchiness into a discussion of frankness in fiction—fiction as the secret and the taboo disclosed—when she rose to stand at respectful attention, a thin middle-aged woman in a neat dark suit and a pillbox hat: “Professor, I know that if you’re writing a friendly letter to a little boy, you write on the envelope ‘Master.’ But what if you’re writing a friendly letter to a little girl? Do you still say ‘Miss’—or just what do you say?”

  The class, having endured nearly two hours of a kind of talk none of them had probably ever heard before outside of a church, took the occasion of her seemingly ludicrous question to laugh uproariously—she was the kid who had farted following the principal’s lecture on discipline and decorum. Their laughter was pointedly directed at student, not teacher; nonetheless, I flushed with shame and remained red all the while Mrs. Corbett, dogged and unperturbed in the face of the class’s amusement, pursued the knowledge she was there for.

  Lydia Ketterer turned out to be by far the most gifted writer in the class and, though older than I, still the youngest of my students—not so young, however, as she looked in the bleak heart of a Chicago winter, dressed in galoshes, knee stockings, tartan skirt, “reindeer” sweater, and the tasseled red wool hat, from which a straight curtain of wheat-colored hair dropped down at either side of her face. Outfitted for the ice and cold, she seemed, amid all those tired night-school faces, a junior-high-school girl-in fact, she was twenty-nine and mother of a lanky ten-year-old already budding breasts more enticing than her own. She lived not far from me in Hyde Park, having moved to the university neighborhood four years earlier, following her breakdown —and in the hope of changing her luck. And indeed when we met in my classroom, she probably was living through what were to be the luckiest months of her life: she had a job she liked as an interviewer with a university-sponsored social science research project at two dollars an hour, she had a few older graduate students (connected to the project) as friends, she had a small bank account and a pleasant little apartment with a fireplace from which she could see across the Midway to the Gothic facades of the university. Also at that time she was the willing and grateful patient of a lay psychoanalyst, a woman named Rutherford, for whom she dressed up (in the most girlish dress-up clothes I’d seen since grade school, puffed sleeves, crinolines, etc.) and whom she visited every Saturday morning in her office on Hyde Park Boulevard. The stories she wrote were inspired mostly by the childhood recollections she delivered forth to Dr. Rutherford on these Saturdays and dealt almost exclusively with the period after her father had raped her and run, when she and her mother had been taken on as guests—her mother as guest, Lydia as Cinderella—by the two aunts in their maidenly little prison house in Skokie.

  It was the accumulation of small details that gave Lydia’s stories such distinction as they had. With painstaking diligence she chronicled the habits and attitudes of her aunts, as though with each precise detail she was hurling a small stone back through her past at those pinch-faced little persecutors. From the fiction it appeared that the favorite subject in that household was, oddly enough, “the body.” “The body surely does not require that much milk on a bowl of puffed oats, my dear.” “The body will take only so much abuse, and then it will halk.” And so on. Unfortunately, small details, accurately observed and flatly rendered, did not much interest the rest of the class unless the detail was “symbolic” or sensational. Those who most hated Lydia’s stories were Agniashvily, an elderly Russian émigré who wrote original “Ribald Classics” (in Georgian, and translated into English for the class by his stepson, a restaurateur by trade) aimed at the Playboy “market”; Todd, a cop who could not go two hundred words into a narrative without a little something running in the gutter (blood, urine, “Sergeant Darling’s dinner”) and was a devotee (I was not—we clashed) of the O. Henry ending; the Negro woman, Mrs. Corbett, who was a file clerk with the Prudential during the day and at night wrote the most transparent and pathetic pipe dreams about a collie dog romping around a dairy farm in snow-covered Minnesota; Shaw, an “ex-newspaperman” with an adjectival addiction, who was always quoting to us something that “Max” Perkins had said to “Tom” Wolfe, seemingly in Shaw’s presence; and a fastidious male nurse named Wertz, who from his corner seat in the last row had with his teacher what is called “a love-hate” relationship. Lydia’s most ardent admirers, aside from myself, were two “ladies,” one who ran a religious bookshop in Highland Park and rather magnified the moral lessons to be drawn from Lydia’s fiction, and the other, Mrs. Slater, an angular, striking housewife from
Flossmoor, who wore heather-colored suits to class and wrote “bittersweet” stories which concluded usually with two characters “inadvertently touching.” Mrs. Slater’s remarkable legs were generally directly under my nose, crossing and uncrossing, and making that whishing sound of nylon moving against nylon that I could hear even over the earnestness of my own voice. Her eyes were gray and eloquent: “I am forty years old, all I do is shop and pick up the children. I live for this class. I live for our conferences. Touch me, advertently or inadvertently. I won’t say no or tell my husband.”

  In all there were eighteen of them and, with the exception of my religionist, not one who seemed to smoke less than a pack a night. They wrote on the backs of order forms and office stationery; they wrote in pencil and in multicolored inks; they forgot to number pages or to put them in order (less frequently, however, than I thought). Oftentimes the first sheet of a story would be stained with food spots, or several of the pages would be stuck together, in Mrs. Slater’s case with glue spilled by a child, in the case of Mr. Wertz, the male nurse, with what I took to be semen spilled by himself.

  When the class got into a debate as to whether a story was “universal” in its implications or a character was “sympathetic,” there was often no way, short of gassing them, of getting them off the subject for the rest of the night. They judged the people in one another’s fiction not as though each was a collection of attributes (a mustache, a limp, a southern drawl) to which the author had arbitrarily assigned a Christian name, but as though they were discussing human souls about to be consigned to Hades or elevated to sainthood—depending upon which the class decided. It was the most vociferous among them who had the least taste or interest in the low-keyed or the familiar, and my admiration for Lydia’s stories would practically drive them crazy; invariably I raised somebody’s hackles, when I read aloud, as an example they might follow, something like Lydia’s simple description of the way in which her two aunts each had laid out on a doily in the bedroom her hairbrush, comb, hairpins, toothbrush, dish of Lifebuoy, and tin of dental powder. I would read a passage like this: “Aunt Helda, while listening to Father Coughlin reasoning with the twenty thousand Christians gathered in Briggs Stadium, would continually be clearing her throat, as though it were she who was to be called upon to speak next.” Such sentences were undoubtedly not so rich and supple as to deserve the sort of extensive, praiseful exegesis I would wind up giving them, but by comparison with most of the prose I read that semester, Mrs. Ketterer’s line describing Aunt Helda listening to the radio in the 1940s might have been lifted from Mansfield Park.

  I wanted to hang a sign over my desk saying ANYONE IN THIS CLASS CAUGHT USING HIS IMAGINATION WILL BE SHOT. I would put it more gently when, in the parental sense, I lectured them. “You just cannot deliver up fantasies and call that ‘fiction.’ Ground your stories in what you know. Stick to that. Otherwise you tend, some of you, toward the pipe dream and the nightmare, toward the grandiose and the romantic—and that’s no good. Try to be precise, accurate, measured…” “Yeah? What about Tom Wolfe,” asked the lyrical ex-newspaperman Shaw, “would you call that measured, Zuckerman?” (No Mister or Professor from him to a kid half his age.) “What about prose-poetry, you against that too?” Or Agniashvily, in his barrel-deep Russian brogue, would berate me with Spillane—“And so how come he’s gotten million in print, Professor?” Or Mrs. Slater would ask, in conference, in-advertently touching my sleeve, “But you wear a tweed jacket, Mr. Zuckerman. Why is it ‘dreamy’—I don’t understand—if Craig in my story wears—“ I couldn’t listen. “And the pipe, Mrs. Slater: now why do you think you have him continually puffing on that pipe?” “But men smoke pipes.” “Dreamy, Mrs. Slater, too damn dreamy.” “But—“ “Look, write a story about shopping at Carson’s, Mrs. Slater! Write about your afternoon at Saks!” “Yes?” “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  Oh, yes, when it came to grandiosity and dreaminess, to all manifestations of self-inflating romance, I had no reservations about giving them a taste of the Zuckerman lash. Those were the only times I lost my temper, and of course losing it was always calculated and deliberate: scrupulous.

  Pent-up rage, by the way—that was the meaning the army psychiatrist had assigned to my migraines. He had asked whether I liked my father better than my mother, how I felt about heights and crowds, and what I planned to do when I was returned to civilian life, and concluded from my answers that I was a vessel of pent-up rage. Another poet, this one in uniform, bearing the rank of captain.

  My friends (my only real enemy is dead now, though my censurers are plentiful)—my friends, I earned those two hundred and fifty dollars teaching “Creative Writing” in a night school, every penny of it. For whatever it may or may not “mean,” I didn’t once that semester get a migraine on a Monday, not that I wasn’t tempted to take a crack at it when a tough-guy story by Patrolman Todd or a bittersweet one by Mrs. Slater was on the block for the evening…No, to be frank, I counted it a blessing of sorts when the headaches happened to fall on the weekend, on my time off. My superiors in the college and downtown were sympathetic and assured me that I wasn’t about to lose my job because I had to be out ill “from time to time,” and up to a point I believed them; still, to be disabled on a Saturday or a Sunday was to me far less spiritually debilitating than to have to ask the indulgence of either my colleagues or students.

  Whatever erotic curiosity had been aroused in me by Lydia’s pretty, girlish, Scandinavian block of a head—and odd as it will sound to some, by the exoticism of the blighted middle western Protestant background she wrote about and had managed to survive in one piece—was decidedly outweighed by my conviction that I would be betraying my vocation, and doing damage to my self-esteem, if I were to take one of my students to bed. As I have said, suppressing feelings and desires extraneous to the purpose that had brought us together seemed to me crucial to the success of the transaction—as I must have called it then, the pedagogical transaction—allowing each of us to be as teacherly or as studently as was within his power, without wasting time and spirit being provocative, charming, duplicitous, touchy, jealous, scheming, etc. You could do all that out in the street; only in the classroom, as far as I knew, was it possible to approach one another with the intensity ordinarily associated with love, yet cleansed of emotional extremism and tree of base motives having to do with profit and power. To be sure, on more than a few occasions, my night class was as perplexing as a Kafka courtroom, and my composition classes as wearisome as any assembly line, but that our effort was characterized at bottom by modesty and mutual trust, and conducted as ingenuously as dignity would permit, was indisputable. Whether it was Mrs. Corbett’s innocent and ardent question about how to address a friendly letter to a little girl or my own no less innocent and ardent introductory lecture to which she was responding, what we said to one another was not uttered in the name of anything vile or even mundane. At twenty-four, dressed up like a man in a clean white shirt and a tie, and bearing chalk powder on the tails of my worn tweed jacket, that seemed to me a truth to be held self-evident. Oh, how I wanted a soul that was pure and spotless!