The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

by Roth, Philip

  “Oh,” cries Peter Tarnopol in My Life as a Man, pining for the Sarah Lawrence senior whom he’d cast off in favor of his angry nemesis, “why did I forsake Dina Dornbusch—for Maureen!” Why did I forsake Gayle for Josephine Jensen? Over a period of some two years, while I was in graduate school and in the Army, Gayle and I were equally caught up by an obsessional passion yet, returning to Chicago in September 1956, I thought my voyage out—wherever it might be taking me—could no longer be impeded by this affair, which, as I saw it, had inevitably to resolve into a marriage linking me with the safe enclosure of Jewish New Jersey. I wanted a harder test, to work at life under more difficult conditions.

  The joke on me was that Gayle had an enigmatic adventure of her own to undertake and, after graduating from college, propelled by the very gusto and self-assurance that had germinated in the haven of her father’s hothouse, for over a decade led a single life in Europe whose delights had little in common with the pleasures of her conventional upbringing. From the stories that reached me through mutual friends, it sounded as though Harry Milman’s daughter had become the most desirable woman of any nationality between the Berlin Wall and the English Channel; meanwhile, the outward-bound voyager who refused to curb his precious independence by even the shadow of a connection with the provincial world he’d outgrown had sealed himself into a joyless existence, rife with the most preposterous, humanly meaningless responsibilities.

  I had got everything backward. Josie, with her chaotic history, seemed to me a woman of courage and strength for having survived that awful background. Gayle, on the other hand, because of all that family security and all that father love, seemed to me a girl whose comfortable upbringing would keep her a girl forever. Gayle would be dependent because of her nurturing background and Josie would be independent because of her broken background! Could I have been any more naïve? Not neurotic, naïve, because that’s true about us too: very naïve, even the brightest, and not just as youngsters either.

  * * *

  THREE CLOSE FRIENDSHIPS that I made at the university during my first months back in Chicago were with the novelists Richard Stern and Thomas Rogers and the critic and editor Ted Solotaroff. The three of them were four to five years older than I and already married—Dick and Ted each had a couple of small children—but we were all still only in our twenties and wanted to be writers. Dick and Tom were new members of the U of C faculty, while Ted was teaching evening classes down at an Indiana University extension in Gary and studying as I was in the Chicago Ph.D. program. Josie and I would see the Sterns or the Rogerses or the Solotaroffs fairly regularly for dinner or a poker game or a beer, and the camaraderie made us seem something like a married couple ourselves, even if I was more aware than ever, particularly from the example of Ted’s difficult life and the obvious strain that a family imposed on his time to write and to pursue his degree, that for financial reasons alone my own writing ambition would best be served by being responsible for only myself. Though my salary was $2,800 a year, I was still trying to save toward the European journey that seemed to me very much a part of a literary apprenticeship. I was almost certain that I could never expect to live on my earnings as a writer, even if eventually I came to be published in large-circulation magazines as well as in the literary quarterlies that were my natural home in those days. It went without saying (certainly at the University of Chicago) that one did not write in the expectation of making money. I thought that if I was ever pressed to write for money, I wouldn’t be able to write at all.

  During the first months Josie and I were together I talked much of the time about writing, bought her my favorite paperbacks, loaned her heavily underlined Modern Library copies of the classics, read aloud pages from the novelists I admired, and began after a while to show her the manuscripts of the stories I was working on. When I was asked to contribute movie reviews to the New Republic at $25 a shot (a job offered to me as a result of a little satire about Eisenhower’s evening prayer that the New Republic had reprinted from the Chicago Review), we went to the films together and talked about them on the way home. Over dinner we educated each other about those dissimilar American places from which we’d emerged, she badly impeded and vulnerable—and only now sufficiently free to try valiantly to recover her equilibrium and make a new life as an independent woman—and I, from the look of it, fortified, intact, and hungry for literary distinction. The stories I told of my protected childhood might have been Othello’s tales about the men with heads beneath their shoulders, so tantalized was she by the atmosphere of secure, dependable comfort that I ascribed to my mother’s genius for managing our household affairs and to the dutiful perseverance of both my parents even in their years of financial strain. I spoke of the artistry practiced within my mother’s kitchen with no less enthusiasm than when I enlightened her about the sensuous accuracy of Madame Bovary. Because the grade and high schools I attended had been virtually down the street from our house, I had as a boy gone home for lunch every day—the result, I told her, was that after I’d returned from teaching my morning classes and changed from my new suit into my old writing clothes the first whiff of Campbell’s tomato soup heating up in the kitchen of my little Chicago flat could still arouse the coziest sense of anticipation and imminent, satisfying consummation, yielding what I had only recently learned to recognize as a “Proustian” thrill (despite my inability during consecutive summers to get beyond page 60 of Swann’s Way).

  Was I exaggerating? Did I idealize? I don’t know—did Othello? Winning a new woman with one’s narratives, one tends not to worry about what I once heard an Englishman describe as “overegging the custard.” I think now that what encouraged me to disclose in such loving detail a memory I wouldn’t have dreamed of exploiting while wooing a confident, well-brought-up girl like Polly Bates, whose faith in her origins was unchallengeable—and that would have been entirely beside the point with Gayle Milman, the daughter of a Jewish household far more of a lotus land to its offspring than my own—was an innate taste for dramatic juxtaposition, an infatuation with the coupling of seemingly alien perspectives. My unbroken progress from the hands of the mohel to Mildred Martin, my history as the gorged beneficiary of overdevotion, overprotection, and oversurveillance within an irreproachably respectable Jewish household, was recounted in alternating sequence with her own life stories and formulated, I think, as a moral antidote to flush from her system the poisonous residue still tainting her belief in the possibilities for fulfillment. I was wooing her, I was wowing her, I was spiritedly charming her—motivated by an egoistic young lover’s predilection for intimacy and sincerity, I was telling her who I thought I was and what I believed had formed me, but I was also engaged by a compelling form of narrative responsory. I was a countervoice, an antitheme, providing a naïve challenge to the lurid view of human nature that emerged from her tales of victimized innocence, first as an only child raised from her earliest years as the not entirely welcome guest—along with her long-suffering mother and semiemployable father—in the house of her Grandfather and Stepgrandmother Hebert and then at the hands of the high school sweetheart whom she’d married and whom she had reason, she told me, to despise forever.

  She would despise him forever. I was as hypnotized—and flooded with chivalric fantasies of manly heroism—by her unforgiving hatred of all the radically imperfect gentile men who she claimed had abused her and had come close to ruining her as she was enchanted—and filled with fantasy—by my Jewish idyll of neatly ironed pajamas and hot tomato soup and what that promised about the domestication, if not the sheer feminizing, of unmuzzled maleness. The more examples she offered of their irresponsible, unprincipled conduct, the more I pitied her the injustices she had had to endure and admired the courage it had taken to survive. When she reviled them with that peculiarly potent adjective of hers, “wicked”—which I till then had associated primarily with people like the defendants at Nuremberg—the nearer I felt drawn to a world from which I no longer wished to be sheltered
and about which a man in my intended line of work ought really to know something: the menacing realms of benighted American life that so far I had only read of in the novels of Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. The more graphically she illustrated their callow destructiveness of every value that my own family held dear, the more contempt I had for them and the more touching examples I provided of our exemplary history of harmlessness. I could as well have been working for the Anti-Defamation League—only instead of defending my minority from anti-Semitic assaults on their good name and their democratic rights, I cast myself as the parfit Jewish knight dispatched to save one of their own from the worst of the gentile dragons.

  Four months after we’d met Josie discovered she was pregnant. I couldn’t understand how it had happened, since even when she claimed it was a safe time of the month and saw no need for contraception, I insisted on her using a diaphragm. We were both stunned, but the doctor, an idealistic young neighborhood GP who had been treating Josie at very modest rates, came around to her apartment to confirm it. Sitting gloomily over coffee with him in the kitchen, I asked if there was any way to abort the pregnancy. He said that all he could do was try a drug that at this stage sometimes induced heavy bleeding that then required hospitalization for a D&C. The chances were slim that it would work—but astoundingly it did; in a matter of days Josie began to hemorrhage, and I took her to the hospital for the scraping. When she was back in her room later in the day I returned to visit, bearing a bunch of flowers and a bottle of domestic champagne. I found her in bed, as contented-looking as a woman who had given birth to a perfect child and talking brightly to a middle-aged man who turned out to be not a member of the medical staff but a rabbi who served as one of the hospital chaplains. After he and I exchanged pleasantries, the rabbi left her bedside so that Josie and I could be alone. I said to her suspiciously, “What was he doing here?” Perfectly innocently she replied, “He came to see me.” “Why you?” “On the admissions form,” she said, “under religion, I wrote ‘Jewish.’” “But you’re not Jewish.” She shrugged, and in the circumstances I didn’t know what more to say. I was perplexed by what seemed to me her screwy mix of dreaminess and calculation, yet still so relieved that we were out of trouble that I dropped the interrogation, got some glasses, and we drank to our great good luck.

  Two years later she turned up pregnant again. By then we no longer had anything resembling a love affair, only a running feud focused on my character flaws and from which I was finding it impossible to escape no matter how far I fled. I had spent the summer of 1958 traveling by myself in Europe and, instead of returning to Chicago, had quit my job and moved to Manhattan. I had found an inexpensive basement apartment on the Lower East Side and was living off the first payment of the $7,500 fellowship Houghton Mifflin had just awarded me for the manuscript of Goodbye, Columbus, which they were to publish in the spring of 1959. I had left Chicago for good in May after a year in which the deterioration of trust between Josie and me had elicited the most grueling, draining, bewildering quarrels: her adjective “wicked” did not sound so alluring when it began to be used to describe me. Except for unavoidable encounters around the university neighborhood, half of the time we didn’t see each other at all, and for a while, after we had seemingly separated for good, I became enamored of a stylish Radcliffe graduate, Susan Glassman, who was living with her prosperous family on the North Shore and taking graduate classes in English at Chicago. She was a beautiful young woman who seemed to me all the more desirable for being a little elusive, though actually I didn’t like too much that I couldn’t entirely seem to claim her attention. One afternoon I dealt the final blow to whatever chances I had with Susan by asking her to come along with me to hear Saul Bellow speak at the Hillel House. Josie happened to have taken the afternoon off from work and to my dismay was in the audience too; but as Bellow was one of my literary enthusiasms that she’d come to share, neither of us should really have been as surprised as we appeared to be by the other’s presence. After the talk, Susan went off to introduce herself to Bellow; they had met once through mutual friends at Bard, and, as it turned out, in those few minutes a connection was reestablished that would lead in a couple of years to her becoming Bellow’s third wife. Josie, who’d come to the Hillel House on her own, superciliously looked my way while Susan was standing and talking to Bellow; when I came over to say hello, she muttered, with a sharp little laugh, “Well, if that’s what you like—!” There was nothing to say to that, and so I just walked off again and waited to take Susan out for a drink with the Solotaroffs. Later in the evening, when I got back to my apartment, I found a scribbled note in my mailbox, tellingly succinct—and not even signed—to the effect that a rich and spoiled Jewish clotheshorse was exactly what I deserved.

  What I discovered when I returned from Europe in September 1958 was that, having spent July and August working in New York for Esquire, Josie had decided against returning to Chicago and her secretarial job at the university. She’d enjoyed Manhattan and her position at the fringe of the literary life and had decided to stay on “in publishing,” for which she had no qualifications aside from the little experience at Esquire. But if I was Jewish she was Jewish, if I lived in Manhattan she lived in Manhattan, if I was a writer she was a writer, or would at least “work” with writers. It turned out that during the summer she had let on to some of the magazine people she’d met that she had “edited” my stories that had begun to appear in Commentary and the Paris Review. When I corrected her and said that though she certainly read them and told me what she thought, that was not what was meant by “editing,” she was affronted: “But it is—I am your editor!”

  The quarreling started immediately. Because of her desperation at finding herself purposeless in New York and unwanted by me, the exchanges were charged with language so venomous that afterward I would sometimes wind up out on the street wandering around alone for hours as though it were my life that had hit bottom. She located an apartment to sublet, moved in, and then mysteriously the apartment was lost; she found a job, turned up for work—or said she did—and then mysteriously there was no job. Her little reserve of money was running out, she had nowhere permanent to live, and none of her job interviews seemed ever to yield anything real. Repeatedly she would get on the wrong subway and call from phone booths in Queens or Brooklyn, panting and incoherent, begging me to come get her.

  I didn’t know what to do or whom to turn to. I was new to New York myself, and the only person I could have confided in was my brother. After all, it was in the paperback books that he brought home on weekends from Pratt Institute when he was an art student there that I had got my first glimpse of serious modern fiction. What’s more, when I was fourteen and fifteen, and he was filling his student sketchbooks with slices of urban landscape and rapid portraits of seedy city dwellers, his determination to seek an artistic vocation wasn’t without its inspiring effect. His diligent example established in my own mind the understanding that an insurance man’s son had the right—if he had the talent and industry—to pursue something other than a conventional career in business or the professions. Why my father never seriously questioned Sandy’s decision or tried in any serious way to alter his course—or to interfere later with my aspirations—may have something to do with the example of my mother’s brother, Mickey, if one can even speak of the influence of a mild, mordantly humorous loner who would never have presumed to advocate his way of life to anyone, least of all to my brother, to whom he passed on some of his cherished old anatomy books but whom he dryly warned of the impossibility of being a good artist, let alone making a living as one. Nonetheless, the precedent that our Uncle Mickey furnished made painting seem to the family not so much a curiosity as a real line of work; whether it was a desirable line of work was something else—Mickey’s shabby, comfortless existence in his small Philadelphia studio would intermittently arouse my father’s ire, and he would harangue our poor mother at dinner about how her brother ought at least to g
o out and find himself a girl to marry. The freedom that Sandy and I felt in experimenting with work so far outside the local cultural orbit probably had also to do with the fact that our father, lacking a real education himself, was, luckily for us, deficient in specific ideas about what vocations his sons might best aspire to. He wanted mainly for us not to be wanting, and that we could accomplish by hard work.

  Though Sandy and I sometimes felt as though we had a lot to say to each other, in the years after I came out of the Army, we began to be drawn apart by the sentiments and interests predictably associated with our work, his as a commercial artist at an advertising agency and mine as a college instructor and novice writer. When we were together I did my best to suppress my disdain (not inconsiderable in my twenties and the Eisenhower fifties) for the advertising man’s point of view; but he was hardly less aware of it than I was of his uneasiness around university types and highbrow intellectuals or of the provocation that he sensed in what he took to be their pretensions. This was not, of course, a major concern of his, and it unsettled his general equilibrium as little as the agenda of J. Walter Thompson Co. seriously interfered with how I lived; still, a suspicious undercurrent between us, fostered by strong professional polarities, made for self-consciousness and even shyness when we met or telephoned. On top of that, Josie and Sandy’s wife, Trudy, couldn’t stand each other, and so we had no more reason to go out and socialize as couples than to sit down together and talk intimately—“like brothers,” as my father would have advised. Because Sandy was embarked on a marriage and a career pointing him in a more conventional direction than mine, planning the sort of life that looked to me to have more obviously evolved from the background I’d put behind me, it didn’t seem to me that he would have had the wherewithal—“morally,” as I would have been quick to say then—to help me through my predicament or, if he did, that it was possible for me with my values, to solicit his assistance. This was hubris, pure and simple, the arrogance of a young literary mentality absolutely assured of its superior wisdom, as well as the pride of a raw recruit of a man, vigorously intent on being independent, who could not confess to an older, seemingly less adventurous brother that he was being dragged beyond his depth and needed someone strong to save him.