The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

by Roth, Philip

  Girl of My Dreams

  I’d noticed her long before that evening in Chicago when I introduced myself out on the street and persuaded her to have a cup of coffee with me in Steinway’s drugstore, a university hangout only a few blocks from where she lived. Out of either shyness or savoir faire, I’d never in my life tried as blatantly to pick anybody up, which indicates not so much that fate had a hand in my trying now but that I was determined—as culturally inclined as I was psychologically resolved—to have my adventure with this woman who appeared to be the incarnation of a prototype.

  In October 1956 I was not yet twenty-four, the Army was behind me, and my second published short story had been plucked from a tiny literary magazine and selected for Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories of 1956. I was an instructor (as well as a Ph.D. candidate) at the University of Chicago, I was sporting a tan glen-plaid Brooks Brothers University Shop suit that I’d bought with Army separation pay in order to meet my college composition classes, and, having just come from a cocktail party at the Quadrangle Club for new faculty members, I had some four or five ounces of bourbon enkindling my flame. Roaring with confidence, then, and feeling absolutely free (“… they were drunken, young, and twenty … and they knew that they could never die.” T. Wolfe), I corralled her in the doorway of Woodworth’s bookstore and said something like, “But you must have a cup of coffee with me—I know all about you.” “Do you? What’s there to know?” “You used to be a waitress in Gordon’s.” Gordon’s was another university hangout, a restaurant just next door to Woodworth’s. “Was I?” she replied. “You have two small children.” “Do I?” “You come from Michigan.” “And how do you know that?” “I asked. One day at Gordon’s I saw your children with you. A little boy and a girl. About eight and six.” “And just why have you bothered to remember all this?” “You seemed young to have those kids. I asked somebody and they told me you were divorced. They told me you were once an undergraduate here.” “Not long enough for it to matter.” “They told me your name. Josie. I came here as a graduate student in ’54,” I told her—“I used to have lunch at Gordon’s. You waited on me and my friends.” “I’m afraid I don’t have that good a memory,” she said. “I do,” I replied, and doggedly witty, doggedly clever, doggedly believing myself utterly impregnable, I got her finally to accede—I would rarely ever get her to do that again—and to walk down the block and sit with me in a booth in the window of Steinway’s. There the published young instructor presented his plumage in full, while Josie, quizzical and amused and flattered, said—in an ironic allusion to her powers to inflame—that she couldn’t figure out what I was so fervent about.

  But I was fervent then about almost everything, and that evening fervent in the extreme because of those straight bourbons that I’d been drinking at the faculty-club party, where I was the university’s youngest new faculty member and arguably its happiest. If she couldn’t understand why the fervor had fastened on her it was because what I experienced at twenty-three as the power of a fascinating prototype felt to her at twenty-seven like the sum of all her impediments. The exoticism wasn’t solely in her prototypical blue-eyed blondness, though she was blue-eyed and very blond, a woman whose squarish, symmetrical face, no matter how worn down by furious combat, could still manage to look childlike and tomboyish in a woolen ski hat; it wasn’t in her prototypical gentile appearance, though she was gentile-looking in a volkisch way that recalled nothing of the breezy bearing of brainy Polly, with her sophisticated martinis and her sardonic refinement; it wasn’t in her Americanness either, though her speech and dress and manner made her a virtual ringer for the solid, energetic girl in the cheery movies about America’s heartland, a friend of Andy Hardy’s, a classmate of June Allyson’s, off to the prom in his jalopy with Carleton Carpenter. Though this hardly made her any less American, she was actually a small-town drunkard’s angry daughter, a young woman already haunted by grim sexual memories and oppressed by an inextinguishable resentment over the injustice of her origins; hampered at every turn by her earliest mistakes and driven by fearsome need to bouts of desperate deviousness, she was a more likely fair-haired heroine for the scrutiny of Ingmar Bergman than for the sunny fantasies of M-G-M.

  What was exotic, then, wasn’t the prototypical embodiment of the Aryan gentile American woman—hundreds of young women no less prototypical had failed to excite my interest much at Bucknell—but, as I’d already sensed in Gordon’s restaurant back when she was still a newly divorced waitress with two small kids and I was a U of C graduate student, that she was that world’s victim, a dispossessed refugee from a sociobiological background to which my own was deemed, by both old- and new-world racial mythology, to be subservient, if not inferior. Had her father worked for the Metropolitan Life, he could have hoped to rise to be superintendent of agencies, or even dreamed of one day replacing the company president, whereas mine had deemed it necessary to risk our future in a business venture—and had the bad luck to come close to wrecking it—because the biggest financial institution in the world, the light of whose probity never failed, considered those of his religion best qualified for the lower levels of the corporate work force. Yet the fact was that her own father, a good-looking, former high school athlete named Smoky Jensen, had never been able to hold down a job successfully or give up the bottle and eventually wound up serving time for theft in a Florida jail, while my father, whose lack of education added to the handicap of his Jewish background, had by dint of his slavish energies and indestructible ambition reached a managerial rung on the Metropolitan Life hierarchy that, however insignificant in the company’s overall organizational scheme, represented a real triumph of individual will over institutional bias. It was in large part Smoky Jensen’s record as a father, a worker, a husband, and a citizen that had left Josie without the sustenance of family pride and bereft of affectionate attachment to the place where she’d been raised. She was adrift, not merely resentfully alienated from her Michigan upbringing but crudely and ambiguously amputated from her immediate ordeal as a wife and a mother; because of indebtedness and the fact that her semester and a half at Chicago qualified her for virtually no job that paid anything, she had worried ever since the end of her marriage about what would become of her on her own. Rooted most deeply in this pictorial embodiment of American Nordic rootedness was her hatred for her past and her fear of the future.

  If our contrasting family endowments didn’t accord with ancient racial mythology, they did conform to the simplifications about the inner resources of the Jews and the corrupting vices of the goyim that had sifted into my own sense of human subdivision from the beliefs of my Yiddish-speaking grandparents. Educated on their ancestors’ and their own experience of violence, drunkenness, and moral barbarism among the Russian and Polish peasantry, these unworldly immigrants would not have imagined it to be quite as culturally illuminating as did their highly educated American grandson that a solid female specimen of earthy gentile stock could be blighted at the core by irresponsible parenting, involving not merely alcoholism and petty criminality but, as she would eventually allege, a half-realized attempt at childhood seduction. To them this would have seemed par for the course. Nor would they have found themselves anthropologically beguiled to learn that the divorced woman’s own little boy and girl happened already to be enduring a childhood fate no less harsh than her own. It would simply have substantiated their belief in gentile family savagery to hear how her gentile husband (who, according to Josie’s very dubious testimony, had “brow-beaten” her into conceiving the second child, just as he had “irresponsibly” knocked her up, a single girl starting college, to conceive the first) had “stolen” the two gentile children from their gentile mother and shipped them to be raised by others, more than a thousand miles from her arms, in Phoenix, Arizona. Despite her avowal of gruesome victimization at the hands of yet another merciless shagitz, my grandparents might even have surmised that the woman, having discovered that she was emotionally incapable
of mothering anyone, had herself effectively let the two children go. She would have seemed to them nothing more or less than the legendary old-country shiksa-witch, whose bestial inheritance had doomed her to become a destroyer of every gentle human virtue esteemed by the defenseless Jew.

  Raving within and stolidly blond without—Josie would have seemed to my grandparents the incarnation not of an American prototype but of their worst dream. And just because of that, their American grandson refused to be intimidated and, like a greenhorn haunted by the terrors of a vanished world, to react reflexively and run for his life. I was, to the contrary, thrilled by this opportunity to distinguish at first hand between American realities and shtetl legend, to surmount the instinctive repugnance of my clan and prove myself superior to folk superstitions that enlightened, democratic spirits like me no longer had dignified need of in the heterogeneous U.S.A. And to prove myself superior as well to Jewish trepidation by dint of taming the most fearsome female that a boy of my background might be unfortunate enough to meet on the erotic battlefield. What might signify a dangerous menace to the ghetto mentality, to me—with my M.A. in English and my new three-piece suit—looked as though it had the makings of a bracingly American amorous adventure. After all, the intellectually experimental, securely academic environs of Chicago’s Hyde Park were as far as you could hope to get from the fears of Jewish Galicia.

  During the day Josie worked as a secretary in the Division of Social Sciences, a job that she liked and that brought her into contact with distinguished visitors like Max Horkheimer, the Frankfurt sociologist, who enjoyed her company and sometimes took her to lunch or to the faculty club for a drink, and with a successful woman like Ruth Denney, the assistant to the dean of the division, who was only ten or so years older than Josie and whose professional achievement Josie vastly admired though she realized a little bitterly that she was herself too far in the rear ever to hope to emulate it. The job had helped enormously to get her readjusted to her new life after the frantic period of near-breakdown following the loss of her children. We met and became lovers just as she had begun to enter the most hopeful period of her life since the aborted undergraduate year at Chicago a decade earlier, when she believed she had escaped Port Safehold, Michigan, and everything there that threatened to destroy her.

  Upon my return to Chicago, I’d lived first in a divinity-school residence hall and then in a small apartment—one room with a kitchen—a few blocks from the university. I went off from there every weekday from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. to teach composition and, a couple of afternoons a week, to take courses toward a Ph.D. in the graduate English department. The other afternoons I sat squeezed in at my kitchen table, where the daylight was stronger than it was anywhere else in the minute flat, and wrote short stories on my portable Olivetti. In the evenings I walked over to Josie’s sizable railroad flat in an old building near the IC tracks, carrying with me a wad of freshman essays that I’d correct and grade in her living room after we’d had dinner together and while she got on with chipping away the layered paint to reach the bare pine mantel of the fireplace. I thought it was game of her, after her day at the office, to be laying new linoleum in the kitchen and stripping the paper off the bathroom walls, and I admired the enterprising way in which she partially met the costs of the apartment—which had to be large, she said, so the children could visit during their Arizona school vacations—by renting a back room to a happy-go-lucky premature hippie, a U of C dropout, who, unfortunately, didn’t always have money for the rent. For me, the apartment and Josie’s ambitions for it placed her at the heart of the low-income Hyde Park style of living that I found so congenial, blending as it did the neighborhood’s unselfconscious strains of mildly disorderly bohemianism with the ordinary bourgeois taste for an attractive household where you could comfortably sit listening to music or reading a book or drinking cheap wine with your friends. In those years, nobody we knew wanted to own a television set, while every second person I met seemed to play the recorder.

  Our evenings in Josie’s apartment signaled to me that the aspiration that had carried me away from Newark and off to Bucknell at eighteen had been triumphantly realized at twenty-three (despite the fact that I was still a student and, except for my year in the Army, had been one since I was five): I was at last a man. It may be that why I dropped out of the Ph.D. program after little more than one quarter, why sitting in a class answering questions and going home to study for still more exams were all at once unendurable, had to do not just with deciding (largely because of my Martha Foley story) to stake my long-term future on writing fiction but with having gained the majority that I’d always known to be the goal of my education. At twenty-three I was independent of my family, though I still phoned them a couple of times a month, wrote occasional letters, and made the trek East at Christmastime to see them; I was settled into a desirable if tedious teaching position at a prestigious university in a city neighborhood where there were lots of secondhand bookstores and plenty of original intellectual types; and above all, I was conducting my first semidomesticated love affair where—even though their spectral presence was gigantic—nobody’s parents were actually nearby, a love affair with a woman even more profoundly on her own than I was. That she was four years older than I seemed only further evidence of my maturity: our seemingly incompatible backgrounds attested to my freedom from the pressure of convention and my complete emancipation from the constraining boundaries protecting my preadult life. I was not only a man, I was a free man.

  I thought then that I couldn’t have found a more exhilarating intellectual arena than the University of Chicago in which to exercise my freedom to its utmost. After being discharged from the Army in August, I’d gone up to New York to begin looking for a job. Charlotte Maurer helped get me an interview at the New Yorker, and through the influence of the novelist Charles Jackson, who wrote copy at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where my brother was then an art director, I had gotten to see Roger Straus, Jackson’s publisher, who twenty years later became my own publisher. A few days after the interviews, I was elated to find myself being offered two jobs—as a copy editor at Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy and as a checker at the New Yorker. Before I could choose between them, however, a telegram arrived unexpectedly from Napier Wilt, a former teacher of mine and dean of humanities at Chicago; at the last minute a position had opened up on the freshman composition staff of the college, and Wilt was asking if I was interested in joining the Chicago faculty as an instructor in September.

  Not only did I consider university teaching worthwhile, interesting work, but it was clear that of the three jobs the instructorship would afford the most opportunity to write: even with three composition sections, each meeting five hours a week, I’d still have as much as half of each day left for myself, and then there’d be quarterly breaks, periodic holidays, and summer vacations. All that free time was particularly appealing after my claustrophobic months in the Army. Following basic training at Fort Dix, I’d been assigned to Washington to serve as a private writing news handouts for the public-information officer of Walter Reed Army Hospital. (Because of a back injury sustained at Dix, I eventually wound up a patient in the hospital and, after two months in bed there, was released from the service with a medical discharge.) Working in the public-information office for more than half a year provided my first taste of the tedium of a nine-to-five job; the work was hardly demanding, but there were still days when being cooped up for eight hours, mindlessly banging a typewriter, nearly drove me nuts. Consequently, once I was free of the Army enclosure, I seized on this chance to rise from former graduate student to university instructor and to return to Chicago, once again to argue about books and theorize to my heart’s content about literature and, what’s more, to live on practically nothing (that’s about what the job paid) without feeling like a pauper, which you could do in those days around a university. In 1956, at twenty-three, I saw the University of Chicago as the best place in America to enjoy maximum p
ersonal freedom, to find intellectual liveliness, and to stand, if not necessarily in rebellious opposition, at least at a heartening distance from the prospering society’s engrossment with consuming goods and watching TV.

  * * *

  EVER SINCE THE SUMMER of my Bucknell graduation I’d been carrying in my wallet the photograph of a college student from suburban north Jersey, a Jewish girl whose family history and personal prospects couldn’t have been less like Josie’s; she was quick-witted, intelligent, and vivacious, quite pretty, and possessed of the confidence that’s often the patrimony of a young woman adored since birth by a virile, trustworthy, successful father. Harry Milman, Gayle’s father, made not the slightest attempt to disguise the impassioned pride he took in his four children, toward whom he was unfailingly affectionate and generous; he was a hard-driving, rough-hewn businessman, like my own father out of Jewish immigrant Newark, and in those years when Gayle was still his loving dependent daughter, he loomed in the background of her life as an impressively protective figure. The bond to her mother, a very good-looking woman in her early fifties, had by then begun to chafe an adventurous girl of eighteen and nineteen, yet the relationship, if at times strained, was never in real danger of deteriorating into anything unmanageably painful. The hallmarks of the family were solidarity and confidence. Could Josie have been disarmed of her resentful defiance and permitted to press her nose up against the glass of the picture window of the Milmans’ large suburban house, she might well have stood there weeping with envy and wishing with all her heart to have been transformed into Gayle. She magically sought something approximating that implausible metamorphosis by deciding to marry me against all reasonable resistance and, on top of that, to become a Jew.