My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

  Joan has recently written inviting me to leave Quahsay and come out to California to stay with her and her family for as long as I like. “We won’t even bother you with our goatish ways, if you should just want to sit around the pool polishing your halo. If it pleases you, we will do everything we can to prevent you from having even a fairly good time. But reliable sources in the East tell me that you are still very gifted at that yourself. My dearest Alyosha, between 1939, when I taught you to spell antidisestablishmentarianism,’ and now, you’ve changed. Or perhaps not—maybe what sent you into ecstasy over that word was how difficult it was. Truly, Pep, if your appetite for the disagreeable should ever slacken, I am here and so is the house. Your fallen sister, J.”

  For the record, my reply:

  Dear Joan: What’s disagreeable isn’t being where I am or living as I do right now. This is the best place for me, probably for some time to come. I can’t stay on indefinitely of course, but there are approximations to this sort of life. When Maureen and I lived in New Milford, and I had that twelve-by-twelve shack in the woods behind the house—and a bolt to throw on the door—I could be content for hours on end. I haven’t changed much since 1939: I still like more than anything to sit alone in a room spelling things out as best I can with a pencil and paper. When I first got to New York in ‘62, and my personal life was a shambles, I used to dream out loud in my analyst’s office about becoming again that confident and triumphant college ldd I was at twenty; now I find the idea of going back beyond that even more appealing. Up here I sometimes imagine that I am ten—and treat myself accordingly. To start the day I eat a bowl of hot cereal in the dining room as I did each morning in our kitchen at home; then I head out here to my cabin, at just about the time I used to go off to school. I’m at work by eight forty-five, when “the first bell” used to ring. Instead of arithmetic, social studies, etc., I write on the typewriter till noon. (Just like my boyhood idol, Ernie Pyle; actually I may have grown up to become the war correspondent I dreamed of being in 1943 —except that the front-line battles I report on aren’t the kind I’d had in mind.) Lunch out of a lunch pail provided by the dining hall here: a sandwich, some carrot sticks, an oatmeal cookie, an apple, a thermos of milk. More than enough for this growing boy. After lunch I resume writing until three thirty, when “the last bell” used to ring at school. I straighten up my desk and carry my empty lunch pail back to the dining hall, where the evening’s soup is cooling. The smell of dill, mother’s perfume. Manchester is three miles from the Colony by way of a country road that curves down through the hills. There is a women’s junior college at the edge of town, and the girls are down there by the time I arrive. I see them inside the laundromat and at the post office and buying shampoo in the pharmacy—reminding me of the playground “after school,” aswarm with long-haired little girls a ten-year-old boy could only admire from afar and with wonder. I admire them from afar and with wonder in the local luncheonette, where I go for a cup of coffee. I have been asked by one of the English professors at the college to speak to his writing class. I declined. I don’t want them any more accessible than they would be if I were back in the fifth grade. After my coffee I walk down the street to the town library and sit for a while leafing through the magazines and watching the schoolkids at the long tables copying their book reports off the jacket flaps. Then I go out and hitch a ride back up to the Colony; I couldn’t feel any more trusting and innocent than when I hop out of the car and say to the driver, “Thanks for the ride—s’long!”

  I sleep in a room on the second floor of the big three-story farmhouse that houses the guests; on the main floor are the kitchen, dining hall, and the living room (magazines, record player, and piano); there’s a ping-pong table on a side porch, and that’s just about it. On the floor of my room, in my undershorts, I do half an hour of calisthenics at the end of each afternoon. In the last six months, through dint of exercise and very little appetite, I have become just about as skinny as I was when you used to pretend to play the xylophone on my ribs. After “gym” I shave and shower. My windows are brushed by the needles of an enormous spruce; that’s the only sound I hear while shaving, outside of the water running into the sink. Not a noise I can’t account for. I try each evening to give myself a “perfect” shave, as a shaving ten-year-old might. I concentrate: hot water, soap, hot water, coat of Rise, with the grain, coat of Rise, against the grain, hot water, cold water, thorough investigation of all surfaces…perfect. The vodka martini that I mix for myself at six, I sip alone while listening to the news on my portable radio. (I am on my bed in my bathrobe: face ivory smooth, underarms deodorized, feet powdered, hair combed—clean as a bridegroom in a marriage manual.) The martini was of course not my habit at ten, but something like Dad’s when he came home with his headache (and the day’s receipts) from the store: looking as though he were drinking turpentine, he would toss down his shot of Schenley’s, and then listen in “his” chair to “Lyle Van and the News.” Dinner is eaten at six thirty here, in the company of the fifteen or so guests in residence at the moment, mostly novelists and poets, a few painters, one composer. Conversation is pleasant, or annoying, or dull; in all, no more or less taxing than eating night after night with one’s family, though the family that comes to mind isn’t ours so much as the one Chekhov assembled in Uncle Vanya. A young poetess recently arrived here mired in astrology; whenever she gets going on somebody’s horoscope I want to jump up from the table and get a pistol and blow her brains out. But as we are none of us bound by blood, law, or desire (as far as I can tell), forbearance generally holds sway. We drift after dinner into the living room, to chat and scratch the resident dog; the composer plays Chopin nocturnes; the Neiv York Times passes from hand to hand…generally within the hour we have all drifted off without a word. My understanding is that with only five exceptions, all those in residence right now happen to be in flight, or in hiding, or in recovery—from bad marriages, divorces, and affairs. I have overheard tag ends of conversation issuing from the phone booth down in the kitchen to support this rumor. Two teacher-poets in their thirties who have just been through the process of divesting themselves of wives and children and worldly goods (in exchange for student admirers) have struck up a friendship and compare poems they’re writing about the ordeal of giving up little sons and daughters. On the weekends when their dazzling student girl friends come to visit, they disappear into the bedsheets at the local motel for forty-eight hours at a clip. I recently began to play ping-pong again for the first time in twenty years, two or three fierce games after dinner with an Idaho woman, a stocky painter in her fifties who has been married five times; one night last week (only ten days after her arrival) she drank everything she could find on the premises, including the vanilla extract in the cook’s pantry, and had to be taken away the next morning in a station wagon by the mortician who runs the local AA. We all left our typewriters to stand glumly out on the steps and wave goodbye. “Ah, don’t worry,” she called to us out the car window, “if it wasn’t for my mistakes I’d still be back on the front porch in Boise.” She was our only “character” and far and away the most robust and spirited of the survivors hereabouts. One night six of us went down into Manchester for a beer and she told us about her first two marriages. After she finished, the astrologist wanted to know her sign: the rest of us were trying to figure out how come she wasn’t dead. “Why the hell do you keep getting married, Mary?” I asked her. She chucked me on the chin and said, “Because I don’t want to the shriveled up.” But she’s gone now (probably to marry the mortician), and except for the muffled cries rising from the phone booth at night, it’s as quiet here as a hospital zone. Perfect for homework. After dinner and the Times, I walk back out to my studio, one of twenty cabins scattered along a dirt road that winds through the two hundred acres of open fields and evergreen woods. In the cabin there’s a writing desk, a cot, a Franklin stove, a couple of straight-backed chairs painted yellow, a bookcase painted white, and the wobbly wicker table
where I eat lunch at noon. I read over what I’ve written that day. Trying to read anything else is useless; my mind wanders back to my own pages. I think about that or nothing.

  Walking back to the main house at midnight I have only a flashlight to help me make my way along the path that runs between the trees. Under a black sky by myself, I am no more courageous at thirty-four than I was as a boy: there is the urge to run. But as a matter of fact invariably I will turn the flashlight off and stand out there in the midnight woods, until either fear subsides or I have achieved something like a Mexican standoff between me and it. What frightens me? At ten it was only oblivion. I used to pass the “haunted” Victorian houses on Hawthorne Avenue on my way home from Cub Scout meetings, reminding myself, There are no ghosts, the dead are dead, which was, of course, the most terrifying thought of all. Today it’s the thought that the dead aren’t that turns my knees to water. I think: the funeral was another trick—she’s alive! Somehow or other, she will reappear! Down in town in the late afternoon, I half expect to look into the laundromat and see her stuffing a machine with a bag of wash. At the luncheonette where I go for my cup of coffee, I sometimes sit at the counter waiting for Maureen to come charging through the door, with finger pointed—“What are you doing in here! You said you’d meet me by the bank at four!” “By the bank? Four? You?” And we’re at it. ‘You’re dead,” I tell her, “you cannot meet anyone by any bank if you are, as you are, dead!” But still, you will have observed, I keep my distance from the pretty young students buying shampoo to wash their long hair. Who ever accused a shy ten-year-old of being “a well-known seducer of college girls”? Or, for that matter, heard of a plaintiff who was ashes? “She’s dead,” I remind myself, “and it is over.” But how can that be? Defies credulity. If in a work of realistic fiction the hero was saved by something as fortuitous as the sudden death of his worst enemy, what intelligent reader would suspend his disbelief? Facile, he would grumble, and fantastic. Fictional wish fulfillment, fiction in the service of one’s dreams. Not True to Life. And I would agree. Maureen’s death is not True to Life. Such things simply do not happen, except when they do. (And as time passes and I get older, I find that they do with increasing frequency.)

  I’m sending along Xerox copies of two stories I’ve written up here, both more or less on the Subject. They’ll give you an idea as to why I’m here and what I’m doing. So far no one has read the stories but my editor. He had encouraging things to say about both of them, but of course what he would like to see is that novel for which my publisher advanced twenty thousand dollars back when I was a boy wonder. I know how much he would like to see it because he so scrupulously and kindly avoided mentioning it. He gave the game away, however, by inquiring whether “Courting Disaster” (one of the two stories enclosed) was going “to develop into a longer work about a guilt-ridden Zuckerman and his beautiful stepdaughter in Italy—a kind of post-Freudian meditation on themes out of Anna Karenina and Death in Venice. Is that what you’re up to, or are you planning to continue to write Zuckerman variations until you have constructed a kind of full-length fictional fugue?” Good ideas all right, but what I am doing, I had to tell the man standing there holding my IOU, is more like trying to punch my way out of a paper bag. “Courting Disaster” is a post-cataclysmic fictional meditation on nothing more than my marriage: what if Maureen’s personal mythology had been biographical truth? Suppose that, and suppose a good deal more—and you get “CD.” From a Spielvogelian perspective, it may even be read as a legend composed at the behest and under the influence of the superego, my adventures as seen through its eyes—as “Salad Days” is something like a comic idyll honoring a Pannish (and as yet unpunished) id. It remains for the ego to come forward then and present its defense, for all parties to the conspiracy-to-abscond-with-my-life to have had their day in court. I realize now, as I entertain this idea, that the nonaction narrative that I’m currently working on might be considered just that: the “I” owning up to its role as ringleader of the plot. If so, then after all testimony has been heard and a guilty verdict swiftly rendered, the conspirators will be consigned to the appropriate correctional institution. You suggest your pool. Warden Spielvogel, my former analyst (whose job, you see, I am now doing on the side), would suggest that the band of desperados be handed back over to him for treatment in the cell block at Eighty-ninth and Park. The injured plaintiff in this action does not really care where it happens, or how, so long as the convicted learn their lesson and NEVER DO IT AGAIN. Which isn’t likely: we are dealing with a treacherous bunch here, and that this trio has been entrusted with my well-being is a source of continuous and grave concern. Having been around the track with them once already, I would as soon consign my fate to the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges; buffoons, but they at least like one another. P.S. Don’t take personally the brother of “Salad Days” or the sister of “Courting Disaster.” Imaginary siblings serving the design of the fiction. If I ever felt superior to you and your way of life, I don’t any longer. Besides, it’s to you that I may owe my literary career. Trying on a recent afternoon walk to figure out how I got into this line of work, I remembered myself at age six and you at age eleven, waiting in the back seat of the car for Mother and Dad to finish their Saturday night shopping. You kept using a word that struck me as the funniest thing I’d ever heard, and once you saw how much it tickled me, you wouldn’t stop, though I begged you to from the floor of the car where I was curled up in a knot from pure hilarity. I believe the word was “noodle,” used as a synonym for “head.” You were merciless, somehow you managed to stick it somewhere into every sentence you uttered, and eventually I wet my pants. When Mother and Dad returned to the car I was outraged with you and in tears. “Joannie did it,” I cried, whereupon Dad informed me that it was a human impossibility for one person to pee in another person’s pants. Little he knew about the power of art.

  Joan’s prompt reply:

  Thanks for the long letter and the two new stories, three artful documents springing from the same hole in your head. When that one drilled she really struck pay dirt. Is there no bottom to your guilty conscience? Is there no other source available for your art? A few observations on literature and life—i. You have no reason to hide in the woods like a fugitive from justice. 2. You did not kill her, in any way, shape, or form. Unless there is something I don’t know. 3. To have asked a pretty girl to have intercourse with a zucchini in your presence is morally inconsequential. Everybody has his whims. You probably made her day (if that was you). You announce it in your “Salad Days” story with all the bravado of a naughty boy who knows he has done wrong and now awaits with bated breath his punishment. Wrong, Peppy, is an ice pick, not a garden vegetable; wrong is by force or with children. 4. You do disapprove of me, as compared with Morris certainly; but that, as they say, is your problem, baby. (And brother Moe’s. And whoever else’s. Illustrative anecdote: About six weeks ago, immediately after the Sunday supplement here ran a photo story on our new ski house at Squaw Valley, I got a midnight phone call from a mysterious admirer. A lady. “Joan Rosen?” “Yes.” “I’m going to expose you to the world for what you are.” “Yes? What is that?” “A Jewish girl from the Bronx! Why do you try to hide it, Joan? It’s written all over you, you phony bitch!”) So then, I don’t take either of those make-believe siblings for myself. I know you can’t write about me—you can’t make pleasure credible. And a working marriage that works is about as congenial to your talent and interests as the subject of outer space. You know I admire your work (and I do like these two stories, when I can ignore what they imply about your state of mind), but the fact is that you couldn’t create a Kitty and a Levin if your life depended on it. Your imagination (hand in hand with your life) moves in the other direction. 5. Reservation (“Courting Disaster”): I never heard of anyone killing herself with a can opener. Awfully gruesome and oddly arbitrary, unless I am missing something. 6. Idle curiosity: was Maureen seduced by her father? She never struck me as
broken in that way. 7. After the “nonfiction narrative” on the Subject, what next? A saga in heroic couplets? Suggestion: Why don’t you plug up the well and drill for inspiration elsewhere? Do yourself a favor (if those words mean anything to you) and FORGET IT. Move on! Come West, young man! P.S. Two enclosures are for your edification (and taken together, right up your fictional alley—if you want to see unhappiness, you ought to see this marriage in action). Enclosed note #1 is to me from Lane Coutell, Bridges’ new, twenty-four-year-old associate editor (good-looking and arrogant and, in a way, brilliant; more so right now than is necessary), who was here with his wife for supper and read the stories. He and the magazine would (his “reservations” notwithstanding) give anything (except money, of which there’s none) to publish them, though I made it clear that he’d have to contact you about that. I just wanted to know what someone intelligent who didn’t know your true story would make of what you’ve made out of it here. Enclosed note #2 is from Frances Coutell, his wife, who runs Bridges’ office now. A delicate, washed-out beauty of twenty-three, bristling with spiritual needs; also a romantic masochist who, as you will surmise, has developed a crush on you, not least because she doesn’t like you that much. Fiction does different things to different people, much like matrimony.

  #1

  Dear Joan: As you know I wasn’t one of those who was taken by your brother’s celebrated first novel. I found it much too proper a book, properly decorous and constrained on the formal side, and properly momentous (and much too pointed) in presenting its Serious Jewish Moral Issue. Obviously it was mature for a first novel—too obviously: the work of a gifted literature student strait-jacketed by the idea that fiction is the means for proving righteousness and displaying intelligence; the book seems to me very much a relic of the fifties. The Abraham and Isaac motif, rich with Kierkegaardian overtones, reeks (if I may say so) of those English departments located in the upper reaches of the Himalayas. What I like about the new stories, and why to my mind they represent a tremendous advance over the novel, is that they seem to me a deliberate and largely conscious two-pronged attack upon the prematurely grave and high-minded author of A Jewish Father. As I read it, in “Salad Days” the attack is frontal, head-on, and accomplished by means of social satire, and, more notably, what I’d call tender pornography, a very different thing, say, from the pornography of a Sade or a Terry Southern. For the author of that solemn first novel, a story like “Salad Days” is nothing less than blasphemous. He is to be congratulated heartily for triumphing (at least here) over all that repressive piety and fashionable Jewish angst. “Courting Disaster” is a more complicated case (and as a result not so successful, in a purely literary sense). As I would like to read it, the story is actually a disguised critical essay by Tarnopol on his own overrated first book, a commentary and a judgment on all that principledness that is A Jewish Father’s subject and its downfall. Whether Tarnopol intended it or not, I see in Zuckerman’s devotion to Lydia (its joylessness, its sexless-ness, its scrupulosity, its madly ethical motive) a kind of allegory of Tarnopol and his Muse. To the degree that this is so, to the degree that the character of Zuckerman embothes and represents the misguided and morbid “moral” imagination that produced A ]ewish Father, it is fascinating; to the degree that Tarnopol is back on the angst kick, with all that implies about “moving” the reader, I think the story is retrograde, dull, and boring, and suggests that the conventional (rabbinical) side of this writer still has a stranglehold on what is reckless and intriguing in his talent. But whatever my reservations, “Courting Disaster” is well worth publishing, certainly in tandem with “Salad Days,” a story that seems to me the work of a brand new Tarnopol, who, having objectified the high-minded moralist in him (and, hopefully, banished him to Europe forevermore, there to dwell in noble sadness with all the other “cultural monuments and literary landmarks”), has begun at last to flirt with the playful, the perverse, and the disreputable in himself. If Sharon Shatzky is your brother’s new Muse, and a zucchini her magic wand, we may be in for something more valuable than still more fiction that is “moving.” Lane.