by Philip Roth
And now, class, will you please hand in your papers, and before turning to Dr. Spielvogel’s useful fiction, let us see what you have made of the legends here contrived:
English 312
M&F 1:00-2:30
(assignations by appointment)
Professor Tarnopol
THE USES OF THE USEFUL FICTIONS:
Or, Professor Tarnopol Withdraws
Somewhat from His Feelings
by Karen Oakes
Certainly I do not deny when I am reading that the author may be impassioned, nor even that he might have conceived the first plan of his work under the sway of passion. But his decision to write supposes that he withdraws somewhat from his feelings…
—Sartre, What Is Literature?
On ne feut jamais se connaitre, mais settlement se raconter.
—Simone de Beauvoir
“Salad Days,” the shorter of the two Zuckerman stories assigned for today, attempts by means of comic irony to contrast the glories and triumphs of Nathan Zuckerman’s golden youth with the “misfortune” of his twenties, to which the author suddenly alludes in the closing lines. The author (Professor Tarnopol) does not elucidate in the story the details of that misfortune; indeed, the point he makes is that, by him at least, it cannot be done. “Unfortunately, the author of this story, having himself experienced a similar misfortune at about the same age, does not have it in him, even yet, midway through his thirties, to tell it briefly or to find it funny. ‘Unfortunate,’” concludes the fabricated Zuckerman, speaking in behalf of the dissembling Tarnopol, “because he wonders if that isn’t more the measure of the man than of the misfortune.”
In order to dilute the self-pity that (as I understand it) had poisoned his imagination in numerous previous attempts to fictionalize his unhappy marriage, Professor Tarnopol establishes at the outset here a tone of covert (and, to some small degree, self-congratulatory) self-mockery; this calculated attitude of comic detachment he maintains right on down to the last paragraph, where abruptly the shield of lightheartedness is all at once pierced by the author’s pronouncement that in his estimation the true story really isn’t funny at all. All of which would appear to suggest that if Professor Tarnopol has managed in “Salad Days” to make an artful narrative of his misery, he has done so largely by refusing directly to confront it.
In contrast to “Salad Days,” “Courting Disaster” is marked throughout by a tone of sobriety and an air of deep concern; here is all the heartfeltness that has been suppressed in “Salad Days.” A heroic quality adheres to the suffering of the major characters, and their lives are depicted as far too grave for comedy or satire. The author reports that he began this story intending that his hero should be tricked into marrying exactly as he himself had been. Why that bedeviling incident from Professor Tarnopol’s personal history could not be absorbed into this fictional artifice is not difficult to understand: the Nathan Zuckerman imagined in “Courting Disaster” requires no shotgun held to his head for him to find in the needs and sorrows of Lydia Ketterer the altar upon which to offer up the sacrifice of his manhood. It is not compromising circumstances, but (in both senses) the gravity of his character, that determines his moral career; all the culpability is his.
In “Courting Disaster,” then, Professor Tarnopol conceives of himself and Mrs. Tarnopol as characters in a struggle that, in its moral pathos, veers toward tragedy, rather than Gothic melodrama, or soap opera, or farce, which are the modes that generally obtain when Professor Tarnopol narrates the story of his marriage to me in bed. Likewise, Professor Tarnopol invents cruel misfortunes (i.e., Lydia’s incestuous father, her sadistic husband, her mean little aunts, the illiterate Moonie) to validate and deepen Lydia’s despair and to exacerbate Nathan’s morbid sense of responsibility—this plenitude of heartache, supplying, as it were, “the objective correlative” for the emotions of shame, grief, and guilt that inform the narration.
And that informed Professor Tarnopol’s marriage.
To put the matter altogether directly: if Mrs. Tarnopol had been such a Lydia, if Professor Tarnopol had been such a Nathan, and if I, Karen Oakes, had been a Moonie of a stepdaughter instead of just the star pupil of my sex in English 312 that semester, then, then his subsequent undoing would have made a certain poetic sense.
But as it is, he is who he is, she is who she is, and I am simply myself, the girl who would not go with him to Italy. And there is no more poetry, or tragedy, or for that matter, comedy to it than that.
Miss Oakes: As usual, A+. Prose overly magisterial in spots, but you understand the stories (and the author) remarkably well for one of your age and background. It is always something to come upon a beautiful young girl from a nice family with a theoretical turn of mind and a weakness for the grand style and the weighty epigraph. I remember you as an entirely beguiling person. On my deathbed I shall hear you calling from your room, “Will you hang up the downstairs phone, please, Mom?” That plain-spoken line spoke volumes to me too. Ka-reen, you were right not to run off to Italy with me. It wouldn’t have been Moonie and Zuckerman, but it probably wouldn’t have been any good. Still, you should know that whatever the “neurotic” reason, I was gone on you— let no man, lay or professional, say I wasn’t, or ascribe my “hangup” over you simply to my having transgressed the unwritten law against copulating with those sort-of forbidden daughters known as one’s students (though I admit: asking Miss Oakes, from behind my desk, to clarify further for the other students some clever answer she’d just given in class, only twenty minutes after having fallen to my knees in your room to play the supplicant beneath your belly, was a delicious sensation; cunnilingus aside, I don’t think teaching has ever been so exciting, before or since, or that I’ve ever felt so tender or devoted to any class as I did to our English 312. Perhaps the authorities should reconsider, from a strictly pedagogical point of view, the existing taboo, being mindful of the benefits that may accrue to the class whose teacher has taken one of its members as his secret love; I’ll write the AAUP about this, in good scholarly fashion of course outlining for them the tradition, from Socrates to Abelard to me—nor will I fail to mention the thanks we three received from the authorities for having thrown ourselves so conscientiously into our work. To think, I recounted to you on our very first “date” what they did to Abelard—yet, here I am still stunned at how I got mutilated by the state of New York). Ah, Miss Oakes, if only I hadn’t been so overbearing! Memories of my behavior make me cringe. I told you about Isaac Babel and about my wife with the same veins popping. My insistence, my doggedness, and my tears. How it must have alarmed you to hear me sobbing over the phone—your esteemed professor! If only I had taken it a little easier and suggested a couple of weeks together in northern Wisconsin, some lake somewhere, rather than forever in tragic Europe, who knows, you might have been willing to start off that way. You were brave enough—it’s just that I didn’t have the wherewithal for a little at a time. At any rate, I have had enough Vivid Experience to last awhile, and am off in the bucolic woods writing my memoirs. Whether this will put the Vivid Experience to rest I don’t know. Perhaps what I’ll think when I’m done is that these pages add up to Maureen’s final victory over Tarnopol the novelist, the culmination of my life as her man and no more. To be writing “in all candor” doesn’t suggest that I’ve withdrawn that much from my feelings. But then why the hell should I? So maybe my animus is not wholly transformed—so maybe I am turning art into a chamberpot for hatred, as Flaubert says I shouldn’t, into so much camouflage for self-vindication—so, if the other thing is what literature is, then this ain’t. Ka-reen, I know I taught the class otherwise, but so what? I’ll try a character like Henry Miller, or someone out-and-out bilious like Celine for my hero instead of Gustave Flaubert— and won’t be such an Olympian writer as it was my ambition to be back in the days when nothing called personal experience stood between me and aesthetic detachment. Maybe it’s time to revise my ideas about being an “artist,” or “artis
te” as my adversary’s lawyer preferred to pronounce it. Maybe it was always time. Only one drawback: in that I am not a renegade bohemian or cutup of any kind (only a municipal judge could have taken me for that), I may not be well suited for the notoriety that attends the publication of an unabashed and unexpurgated history of one’s erotic endeavors. As the history itself will testify, I happen to be no more immune to shame or built for public exposure than the next burgher with shades on his bedroom windows and a latch on the bathroom door—indeed, maybe what the whole history signifies is that I am sensitive to nothing in all the world as I am to my moral reputation. Not that I like being fleeced of my hard-earned dough either. Maybe I ought just to call this confession “The Case Against Leeches, by One Who Was Bled,” and publish it as a political tract—go on Johnny Carson and angrily shake an empty billfold at America, the least I can do for all those husbands who’ve been robbed deaf, dumb, and blind by chorines and maureens in the courts of law. Inveigh with an upraised fist against “the system,” instead of against my own stupidity for falling into the first (the first!) trap life laid for me. Or ought I to deposit these pages too into my abounding liquor carton, and if I must embroil myself in the battle yet again, go at it like an artist worthy of the name, without myself as the “I,” without the bawling and the spleen, and whatever else unattractive that shows? What do you think, shall I give this up and go back to Zuckermanizing myself and Lydiafying Maureen and Moonieing over you? If I do take the low road of candor (and anger and so forth) and publish what I’ve got, will you (or your family) sue for invasion of privacy and defamation of character? And if not you, won’t Susan or her family? Or will she go one better and, thoroughly humiliated, do herself in? And how will I take it when my photograph appears on the Time magazine book page, captioned “Tarnopol: stripped to his panties and bra.” I can hear myself screaming already. And what about the letter in the Sunday Times book review section, signed by members of Maureen’s Group, challenging my malicious characterization of Maureen as a pathological liar, calling me the liar and my hook, the fraud. How will I like it when the counterattack is launched by the opposition—will it strike me then that I have exorcised the past, or rather that now I have wed myself to it as irrevocably as ever I was wed to Maureen? How will I like reading reviews of my private life in the Toledo Blade and the Sacramento Bee? And what will Commentary make of this confession? I can’t imagine it’s good for the Jews. What about when the professional marital experts and authorities on love settle in for a marathon discussion of my personality problems on the “David Susskind Show”? Or is that just what I need to straighten me out? Maybe the best treatment possible for my excessive vulnerability and preoccupation generally with My Good Name (which is largely how I got myself into this fix to begin with) is to go forth brazenly crying, “Virtue! a fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.” Sure, quote Iago to them—tell them, “Oh, find me self-addicted and self-deluded, find me self and nothing more!
Call me a crybaby, call me a misogynist, call me a murderer, see if I care. Tis only in ourselves that we are thus or thus—bra and panties notwithstanding. Your names’ll never harm me!” Only they do, Ka-reen, the names drive me wild, and always have. So where am I (to get back to literature): still too much “under the sway of passion” for Flaubertian transcendence, but too raw and touchy by far (or just too ordinary, a citizen like any other) to consider myself equal to what might, in the long run, do my sense of shame the greatest good: a full-scale unbuttoning, a la Henry Miller or Jean Genet…Though frankly (to use the adverb of the unbuttoned), Tarnopol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoirist—his revelations coming to seem like still another “useful fiction,” and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I’m saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close. Or maybe I mean that as far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words-words born either of imagination or forthrightness—as there seems to be (for me) no forgetting it. Maybe I am just learning what a past is. At any rate, all I can do with my story is tell it. And tell it. And tell it. And that’s the truth. And you, what do you do to pass the time? And why do I care all of a sudden, and again? Perhaps because it occurs to me that you are now twenty-five, the age at which I passed out of Eden into the real unreal world—or perhaps it’s just because I remember you being so uncrazy and so much your own person. Young, of course, but that to me made it all the more extraordinary. As did your face. Look, this sexual quarantine is not going to last forever, even 1 know that. So if you’re ever passing through Vermont, give me a call. Maureen is dead (you might not have guessed from how I’ve gone on here) and another love affair ended recently with my friend (the Susan mentioned above) attempting to kill herself. So come on East and try your luck. See me. You always liked a little adventure. As did your esteemed professor of sublimation and high art, Peter T.
My dispute with Spielvogel arose over an article he had written for the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies and published in a special number focusing on “The Riddle of Creativity.” I happened to catch sight of the magazine on his desk as I was leaving the office one evening in the third year of my analysis—noticed the symposium tide on the cover and then his name among the contributors listed below. I asked if I might borrow it to read his paper. He answered, “Of course,” though it seemed to me that before issuing gracious consent, a look of distress, or alarm, had crossed his face—as though anticipating (correctly) what my reaction to the piece would be…But if so, why had the magazine been displayed so conspicuously on the desk I passed every evening leaving his office? Since he knew that like most literary people I as a matter of course scan the titles of all printed matter lying out in the open—by now he had surely observed that reading-man’s tic in me a hundred times—it would seem that either he didn’t care one way or another whether I noticed the Forum, or that he actually wanted me to see his name on the magazine’s cover and read his contribution. Why then the split second of alarm? Or was I, as he was inevitably to suggest later, merely “projecting” my own “anticipatory anxiety” onto him?
“Am I submitted in evidence?” I asked, speaking in a mild, jesting tone, as though it was as unlikely as it was likely and didn’t matter to me either way. “Yes,” answered Spielvogel. “Well,” said I, and pretended to be taken aback a little in order to hide just how surprised I was. “I’ll read it tonight.” Spielvogel’s polite smile now obscured entirely whatever that might really mean to him.
As was now my custom, after the six o’clock session with Dr. Spielvogel, I walked from his office at Eighty-ninth and Park down to Susan’s apartment, ten blocks to the south. It was a little more than a year since Susan had become an undergraduate at City College, and our life together had taken on a predictable and pleasant orderliness—pleasant, for me, for being so predictable. I wanted nothing more than day after day without surprises; just the sort of repetitious experience that drove other people wild with boredom was the most gratifying thing I could imagine. I was high on routine and habit.
During the day, while Susan was off at school, I went home and wrote, as best I could, in my apartment on West Twelfth Street. On Wednesdays I went off in the morning to Long Island (driving my brother’s car), where I spent the day at Hofstra, teaching my two classes and in between having conferences with my writing students. Student stories were just beginning at this time to turn heavily “psychedelic”—undergraduate romantics of my own era had called their unpunctuated pages of random associations “stream-of-consciousness” writing—and to take “dope” smoking as their subject. As I happened to be largely uninterested in drug-inspired visions or the conversation that attended them, and rather impatient with writing that depended for its force upon unorthodox typographical arrangements or marginal decorations in Magic Marker, I found teaching creative writin
g even less rewarding than it had been back in Wisconsin, where at least there had been Karen Oakes. My other course, however, an honors reading seminar in a dozen masterpieces of my own choosing, had an unusually powerful hold on me, and I taught the class with a zealousness and vehemence that left me limp at the end of my two hours. I did not completely understand what inspired this state of manic excitement or produced my molten volubility until the course had evolved over a couple of semesters and I realized what the principle of selection was that lay behind my reading list from the masters. At the outset I had thought I was just assigning great works of fiction that I admired and wanted my fifteen senior literature students to read and admire too—only in time did I realize that a course whose core had come to be The Brothers Karamazov, The Scarlet Letter, The Trial, Death in Venice, Anna Karenina, and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas derived of course from the professor’s steadily expanding extracurricular interest in the subject of transgression and punishment.
In the city at the end of my workday I would generally walk the seventy-odd blocks to Spielvogel’s office—for exercise and to unwind after yet another session at the desk trying, with little success, to make art out of my disaster, but also in the vain attempt to get myself to feel like something other than a foreigner being held against his will in a hostile and alien country. A small-city boy to begin with (growing up in Yonkers in the thirties and forties, I probably had more in common with youngsters raised in Terre Haute or Altoona than in any of the big New York boroughs), I could not see a necessary or sufficient reason for my being a resident of the busiest, most congested spot on earth, especially since what I required above all for my kind of work were solitude and quiet. My brief tenure on the Lower East Side following my discharge from the service certainly evoked no nostalgia; when, shortly after my day in court with Maureen, I hiked crosstown one morning from West Twelfth Street to Tompkins Square Park, it was not to reawaken fond memories of the old neighborhood, but to search through the scruffy little park and the rundown streets nearby for the woman from whom Maureen had bought a specimen of urine some three and a half years earlier. In a morning of hunting around, I of course saw numerous Negro women of childbearing age out in the park and in the aisles of the local supermarket and climbing on and off buses on Avenues A and B, but I did not approach a single one of them to ask if perchance back in March of 1959 she had entered into negotiations with a short, dark-haired young woman from “a scientific organization,” and if so, to ask if she would now (for a consideration) come along to my lawyer’s office to sign an affidavit testifying that the urine submitted to the pharmacist as Mrs. Tarnopol’s had in actuality been her own. Enraged and frustrated as I was by the outcome of the separation hearing, crazed enough to spend an entire morning on this hopeless and useless undercover operation, I was never completely possessed.