by Philip Roth
#2
Joan: My two cents worth, only because the story L. admires most seems to me smug and vicious and infuriating, all the more so for being so clever and winning. It is pure sadistic trash and I pray (actually) that Bridges doesn’t print it. Art is long, but the life of a little magazine is short, and much too short for this. I hate what he does with that suburban college girl—and I don’t even mean what Zuckerman (the predictable prodigal son who majors in English) does but what the author does, which is just to twist her arm around behind her back and say, “You are not my equal, you can never be my equal—understand?” Who does he think he is, anyway? And why would he want to be such a thing? How could the man who wrote “Courting Disaster” want to write a heartless little story like that? And vice versa? Because the long story is absolutely heartrending and I think (contrary to L.’s cold-blooded analysis) that this is why it works utterly. I was moved to tears by it (but then I didn’t perform brain surgery on it) and moved to the most aching admiration for the man who could just conceive such a story. The wife, the daughter, the husband are painfully true (I’m sure because he made me sure), and I shall never forget them. And Zuckerman here is completely true too, sympathetic, interesting, a believable observer and center of feeling, all the things he has to be. In a strange way they were all sympathetic to me, even the awful ones. Life is awful. Yours, Franny. P.S. I apologize for saying that something your brother wrote is hateful. I don’t know him. And I don’t think I want to. There are enough Jekyll and Hydes around here as it is. You’re an older woman, tell me something. What’s the matter with men? What do they want?
My brother Morris, to whom copies of my latest stories were also sent in response to a letter inquiring about my welfare, had his own trenchant comments to make on “Courting Disaster-comments not so unlike Joan’s.
What is it with you Jewish writers? Madeleine Herzog, Deborah Rojack, the curie-pie castrator in After the Fall, and isn’t the desirable shiksa of A New Life a kvetch and titless in the bargain? And now, for the further delight of the rabbis and the reading public, Lydia Zuckerman, that Gentile tomato. Chicken soup in every pot, and a Grushenka in every garage. With all the Dark Ladies to choose from, you luftmenschen can really pick ‘em. Peppy, why are you still wasting your talent on that Dead End Kid? Leave her to Heaven, okay? I’m speaking at Boston University at the end of the month, not that far from you. If you’re still up on the mountain, come down and stay at the Commander with me. My subject is “Rationality, Planning, and Gratification Deferral.” You could stand hearing about a and b; as for c, would you, a leading contender for the tide in the highly competitive Jewish Novelist Division, agree to give a black belt demonstration in same to the assembled students of social behavior? Peppy, enough with her already!
Back in 1960, following a public lecture I had delivered (my first) at Berkeley, Joan and Alvin gave a party for me at the house they had then up on a ridge in Palo Alto. Maureen and I had just returned to the U.S. from our year at the American Academy in Rome, and I had accepted a two-year appointment as “writer-in-residence” at the University of Wisconsin. In the previous twelve months I had become (according to an article in the Sunday Times book section) “the golden boy of American literature”; for A Jewish Father, my first novel, I had received the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim grant of thirty-eight hundred dollars, and then my invitation to teach at Wisconsin. I myself had expected no less, back then; it was not my good fortune that surprised me at the age of twenty-seven.
Some sixty or seventy of their friends had been invited by Joan and Alvin to meet me; Maureen and I lost sight of one another only a few minutes after our arrival, and when she turned up at my side some time later I was talking rather self-consciously to an extremely seductive looking young beauty of about my own age, self-conscious precisely for fear of the scene of jealous rage that proximity to such a sexpot would inevitably provoke.
Maureen pretended at first that I was talking to no one; she wanted to go, she announced, all these “phonies” were more than she could take. I decided to ignore the remark—I did not know what else to do. Draw a sword and cut her head off? I didn’t carry a sword at the time. I carried a stone face. The beautiful girl—from her décolletage it would have appeared that she was something of a daring tastemaker herself; I was too ill at ease, however, to make inquiries of a personal nature—the girl was asking me who my editor was. I told her his name; I said he happened also to be a good poet. “Oh, how could you!” whispered Maureen, and, her eyes all at once flooded with tears; instantly she turned and disappeared into a bathroom. I found Joan within a few minutes and told her that Maureen and I had to go—it had been a long day and Maureen wasn’t feeling well. “Pep,” said Joan, taking my hand in hers, “why are you doing this to yourself?” “Doing what?” “Her,” she said. I pretended not to know what she was talking about. Just presented her with my stone face. In the taxi to the hotel, Maureen wept like a child, repeatedly hammering at her knees (and mine) with her little fists. “How could you embarrass me like that—how could you say that, with me right there at your side!” “Say what?” “You know damn well, Peter! Say that Walter is your editor!” “But he is.” “What about me?” she cried. “You?” “I’m your editor—you know very well I am! Only you refuse to admit it! I read every word you write, Peter. I make suggestions. I correct your spelling.” “Those are typos, Maureen.” “But 1 correct them! And then some rich bitch sticks her tits in your face and asks who your editor is and you say Walter! Why must you demean me like this—oh, why did you do that in front of that empty-headed girl? Just because she was all over you with those tits of hers? Mine are as big as hers—touch them some day and you’ll see!” “Maureen, not this, not again—!” “Yes, again! And again and again! Because you will not change!” “But she meant my editor at my publishing house!” “But I’m your editor!” “You’re not!” “I suppose I’m not your wife either! Why are you so ashamed of me! In front of those phonies, no less! People who wouldn’t look twice at you if you weren’t this month’s cover boy! Oh, you baby! You infant! You hopeless egomaniac! Must you always be at the center of everything?” The next morning, before we left for the airport, Joan telephoned to the hotel to say goodbye. ‘We’re always here,” she told me. “I know.” “If you want to come out and stay.” ‘Well, thank you,” I said, as formally as if I were acknowledging an offer from a perfect stranger, “maybe we’ll take you up on it sometime.” “I’m talking about you. Just you. You don’t have to suffer like this, Peppy. You’re proving nothing by being miserable, nothing at all.” As soon as I hung up, Maureen said, “Oh, you could really have all the beautiful girls, couldn’t you, Peter—with your sister out procuring for you. Oh, she would really enjoy that, I’m sure.” ‘What the hell are you talking about now?” “That deprived little look on your face—’Oh, if I wasn’t saddled with this witch, couldn’t I have a time of it, screwing away to my heart’s content at all the vapid twittering ingénues!’” “Again, Maureen? Again? Can’t you at least let twenty-four hours go by?” ‘Well, what about that girl last night who wanted to know who your editor was? Oh, she really cared about that, I’m sure. Well, be honest, Peter, didn’t you want to fuck her? You couldn’t take your eyes off those tits of hers.” “I suppose I noticed them.” “Oh, I suppose you did.” “Though apparently not so much as you, Maureen.” “Oh, don’t use your sardonic wit on me! Admit it! You did want to fuck her. You were dying to fuck her.” “The fact of it is, I was close to catatonic in her presence.” “Yes, suppressing all that goddam lust! How hard you have to work to suppress it—with everybody but me! Oh, admit it, tell the truth for once—if you had been alone, you know damn well you would have had her back here in this hotel! On this very bed! And she at least would have gotten laid last night! Which is more than I can say for me! Oh, why do you punish me like this—why do you lust after every woman in this whole wide world, except your own wife.”
/> My family…In marked contrast to Joan and Alvin and their children Mab, Melissa, Kim, and Anthony, are my elder brother Morris, his wife Lenore, and the twins, Abner and Davey. In their home the dominant social concern is not with the accumulation of goods, but the means by which society can facilitate their equitable distribution. Morris is an authority on underdeveloped nations; his trips to Africa and the Caribbean are conducted under the auspices of the UN Commission for Economic Rehabilitation, one of several international bothes to which Moe serves as a consultant. He is a man who worries over everything, but nothing (excluding his family), nothing so much as social and economic inequality; what is now famous as “the culture of poverty” has been a heartbreaking obsession with him since the days he used to come home cursing with frustration from his job with the Jewish Welfare Board in the Bronx—during the late thirties, he worked there days while going to school nights at N.Y.U. After the war he married an adoring student, today a kindly, devoted, nervous, quiet woman, who some years ago, when the twins went off to kindergarten, enrolled at the School of Library Service at Columbia to take a master’s degree. She is now a librarian for the city of New York. The twins are fifteen; last year both refused to leave the local upper West Side public school to become students at Horace Mann. On two consecutive days they were roughed up and robbed of their pennies by a Puerto Rican gang that has come to terrorize the corridors, lavatories, and basketball courts back of their school—nonetheless, they have refused to become “private school hypocrites,” which is how they describe their neighborhood friends, the sons and daughters of Columbia faculty who have been removed from the local schools by their parents. To Morris, who worries continuously for their safety, the children shout indignantly, “How can you, of all people, suggest Horace Mann! How can you betray your own ideals! You’re just as bad as Uncle Alvin! Worse!”
Moe has, as he says, only himself to congratulate for their moral heroics; ever since they could understand an English sentence, he has been sharing with them his disappointment with the way this rich country is run. The history of the postwar years, with particular emphasis upon continuing social injustice and growing political repression, has been the stuff of their bedtime stories: instead of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the strange adventures of Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities Committee; instead of Pinocchio, Joe McCarthy; instead of Uncle Remus, tales of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King. I can’t remember once eating dinner at Moe’s, that he was not conducting a seminar in left-wing politics for the two little boys wolfing down their pot roast and kasha—the Rosenbergs, Henry Wallace, Leon Trotsky, Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Dwight Macdonald, George Orwell, Harry Bridges, Samuel Gompers, just a few whose names are apt to be mentioned between appetizer and dessert—and, simultaneously, looking to see that everybody is eating what is best for him, pushing green vegetables, cautioning against soda pop gulped too quickly, and always checking the serving bowls to be sure there is Enough. “Sit!” he cries to his wife, who has been on her feet all day herself, and like an enormous lineman going after a loose fumble, rushes into the kitchen to get another quarter pound of butter from the refrigerator. “A glass of ice water, Pop!” calls Abner. “Who else for ice water? Peppy? You want another beer? I’ll bring it anyway.” His big paws full, he returns to the table, distributes the goods, waving for the boys to go on with what they were saying—intently he listens to them both, the one little boy arguing that Alger Hiss must have been a Communist spy, while the other (in a voice even louder than his brother’s) tries to come to grips with the fact that Roy Cohn is a Jew.
It was to this household that I went to collapse. Moe, at my request, telephoned Maureen the first night after the Brooklyn College episode to say that I had been taken ill and was resting in bed at his apartment. She asked to speak to me; when Moe said, “He just can’t talk now,” she replied that she was getting on the next plane and coming East. Moe said, “Look, Maureen, he can’t see anybody right now. He’s in no condition to.” “I’m his wife!” she reminded him. “But he cannot see anybody.” “What is going on there, Morris, behind my back? He is not a baby, no matter how you people think of him. Are you listening to me? I demand to speak to my husband! I will not be put off by somebody who wants to play big brother to a man who has won the Prix de Rome!” But he was not intimidated, my big bother, and hung up.
At the end of two days of hiding behind his bulk, I told Moe I was “myself” again; I was going back to the Midwest. We had rented a cabin for the summer in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and I was anxious to get out of the apartment in Madison and up to the woods. I said I had to get back to my novel. “And to your beloved,” he reminded me.
Moe made no secret ever of how much he disliked her; Maureen maintained that it was because, unlike his own wife, she, one, was a Gentile, and, two, had a mind of her own. I tried to give him the same stone face that I had given my sister when she had criticized my marriage and my mate. I hadn’t yet told Moe, or anyone, what I had learned from Maureen two months earlier about the circumstances under which we had married—or about my affair with an undergraduate that Maureen had discovered. I just said, “She’s my wife.” “So you spoke to her today.” “She’s my wife, what do you expect me to do!” “She telephoned and so you picked it up and talked to her.” “We talked, right.” “Ah, you jerk-off! And do me a favor, will you, Peppy? Stop telling me she’s your ‘wife.’ The word does not impress me to the extent it does you two. She’s ruining you, Peppy! You’re a wreck! You had a nervous breakdown here only two mornings ago! I don’t want my kid brother cracking up—do you understand that?” “But I’m fine now.” “Is that what your ‘wife’ told you you were on the phone?” “Moe, lay off. I’m not a frail flower.” “But you are a frail flower, putz. You are a frail flower if I ever saw one! Look, Peppy—you were a very gifted boy. That should be obvious. You stepped out into the world like a big, complicated, hypersensitive million-dollar radar system, and along came Maureen, flying her four-ninety-eight model airplane right smack into the middle of it, and the whole thing went on the fritz. And it’s still on the fritz from all I can see!” “I’m twenty-nine now, Moey.” “But you’re still worse than my fifteen-year-old kids! They’re at least going to get killed in behalf of a noble ideal! But you I don’t understand—trying to be a hero with a bitch who means nothing. Why, Peppy? Why are you destroying your young life for her? The world is full of kind and thoughtful and pretty young girls who would be delighted to keep a boy with your bella figura company. Peppy, you used to take them out by the dozens!”
I thought (not for the first time that week) of the kind and thoughtful and pretty young girl, my twenty-year-old student Karen Oakes, whose mistake it had been to involve herself with a Bluebeard like me. Maureen had just that afternoon—during the course of our fifth phone conversation of the hour; if I hung up, she just called back, and I felt duty bound to answer—Maureen had threatened once again to create a scandal at school for Karen—“that sweet young thing, with her bicycle and her braids, blowing her creative writing teacher!”—if I did not get on a plane and come home “instantly.” But it wasn’t to prevent the worst from happening that I was returning; no, whatever reckless act of revenge I thought I might forestall by doing as I was told and coming home, I was not so deluded as to believe that life with Maureen would ever get better. I was returning to find out what it would be like when it got even worse. How would it all end? Could I imagine the grand finale? Oh, I could, indeed. In the woods of Michigan she would raise her voice about Karen, and I would split her crazy head open with an ax—if, that is, she did not stab me in my sleep or poison my food, first. But one way or another, I would be vindicated. Yes, that was how I envisioned it. I had by then no more sense of reasonable alternatives than a character in a melodrama or a dream. As if I ever had, with her.