The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

by Roth, Philip

  Besides, I was the strong one, was I not? I still believed that, and not entirely without reason: these were the most triumphant months of my life. Less than five years out of college, I was about to have a first book published, and my editors at Houghton Mifflin, George Starbuck and Paul Brooks, were tremendously encouraging; on the basis of a few published stories, I had already established a small reputation in New York, and through new friendships with Martin Greenberg at Commentary, Robert Silvers at Harper’s, George Plimpton at the Paris Review, Rust Hills at Esquire, and Aaron Asher at Meridian Books, I was meeting other writers and beginning to enjoy feeling like a writer myself instead of like a freshman-composition teacher who’d written a few short stories on the side. This spent love affair with Josie, a shambles for nearly a year now, couldn’t possibly bring down someone on my trajectory. It wasn’t marriage I was worried about, marriage was inconceivable: I just didn’t want her to have a breakdown and, though I couldn’t believe she would do it, I dreaded the possibility that she might kill herself. She had begun to talk about throwing herself in front of a subway car—and what seemed to have exacerbated her hopelessness was my new literary recognition. “It isn’t fair!” she cried. “You have everything and I have nothing, and now you think you can dump me!”

  Whether appropriately or not, I felt responsible for her having come to New York that summer. The temporary Esquire opening was as a reader for Gene Lichtenstein and Rust Hills, the magazine’s fiction editors; when Josie had heard of the job and expressed interest in it, I had assured Gene and Rust she could do it—I figured that if she got it, it might help, if only temporarily, to quiet her complaint about going nowhere in life. I suppose I thought of this as the last thing I would try to help her out with before I disappeared completely. Later she was to claim that if Rust Hills hadn’t promised her that the job would become permanent after the summer she would never have left Chicago; she would also have returned to Chicago if I hadn’t implied, in letters that I’d written her from Europe, that I wanted her to stay on after I got back to New York. Rust Hills and I had both misled her, and when she turned up at the dock to meet my boat at the end of August 1958, it was because she knew that’s what I’d wanted. Waving excitedly from the pier in a white summer dress, she looked very like a bride. Maybe that was the idea.

  We spent a couple of endurable evenings during the following weeks with a young English architect whom I’d met on the boat and his English girlfriend, who was working in New York for Vogue at just the kind of job Josie wanted but couldn’t seem to get. One of those nights we attempted to make love in my basement apartment; that I was pretty obviously without desire put her into a rage about “all the girls you screwed in Europe.” I didn’t deny that I hadn’t been chaste while I was traveling—“Why should I have been?” I asked—thus making things predictably worse. By November she was wandering around New York with no money and nowhere of her own to live, and eventually, when she wound up one cold morning standing with her suitcase at the foot of the cracked concrete stairs leading down to my apartment and demanding that I summon up just one iota of compassion and give her a place to stay, it occurred to me to abandon the apartment to her—forget my records and my books and the few hundred dollars’ worth of secondhand furniture, and disappear with what remained of my Houghton Mifflin money. But there was a two-year lease on the $80-a-month apartment to which I’d signed my name, there were my parents in New Jersey, whom I spoke to on the phone weekly and who were delighted that I appeared to be permanently settled back East—and there was the promise of my new life in Manhattan. There was also my refusal to run away. Fleeing and hiding were repugnant to me: I still believed that there were certain character traits distinguishing me from the truly wicked bastards out of her past. “You and Rust Hills and my father!” she shouted, weeping outside the doorway at the bottom of that dark well—“You’re all exactly the same!” It was the craziest assertion I had ever heard, and yet, as though I had no choice but to take the accusation seriously and prove myself otherwise, instead of running I stayed. So did she. With me.

  So the second time she turned up pregnant was early in February 1959. I won’t describe our life together on the Lower East Side during the three preceding months except to say that I’m as surprised today as I was then that we didn’t wind up—one or both of us—maimed or dead. She produced the perfect atmosphere in which I couldn’t think. By the beginning of the year in which Goodbye, Columbus was to be published, I was nearly as ripe for hospitalization as she was, my basement apartment having all but become a psychiatric ward with café curtains.

  How she could be pregnant was even harder to understand this time than it had been in Chicago the year before, when it never occurred to me that the pregnancy had resulted from her failing to use the diaphragm she invariably purported to be going off to the bathroom to insert. She already had two children she couldn’t raise and grievously missed—why would she go out of her way to have a third? Four months after we’d met there’d been no reason to question her honesty—unless, of course, instead of swallowing whole her story of relentless victimization, instead of being so beguiled by the proximity she afforded me to the unknown disorders of gentile family life—to those messy, sordid, unhappy realities that inspired my grandparents’ goy-hating legends—I’d had the know-how at twenty-four to cast as cold an eye on her self-presentation as she did on the men who had been abusing her all her life.

  It was true that in the middle of the night there had been two, three, even perhaps four fantasy-ridden, entangled couplings in which we had somehow slaked our anger and, somnambulistically, eased the physical hunger aroused by the warm bed and the pitch-black room and the discovery of an identityless human form among the disheveled bedclothes. In the full light of morning I would wonder if what I seemed to remember had not been enacted in a dream; on the February morning that she announced she was pregnant once again, I could have sworn that for weeks and weeks I hadn’t even dreamed such an encounter—I was erotically too mummified even for that. I had just come back from Boston, where I had been seeing to the galleys of my book with George Starbuck, and it was more or less with the news of her pregnancy that she greeted my return: not only was I on the brink of being the author of a first collection of stories, I was scheduled to become a father as well. It was a lie, I knew the moment she said it that it was a lie, and I believed that what had prompted the lie was her desperation over my Boston trip, her fear that with the publication of my first book, which was only months away, my conscience would be catapulted beyond the reach of her accusations, my self-esteem elevated to heights that would have situated her too—if only she was at my side—high above the hell of all that failure.

  When I told her that it was impossible for her to be pregnant again, she repeated that she was indeed going to have a baby and that, if I “wickedly” refused to be responsible for it, she would carry it to term and leave it on my parents’ doorstep in New Jersey.

  I didn’t think she was incapable of doing that (had she been pregnant, that is), for by this time she was nursing a grievance against my parents too—she claimed they’d treated her “ruthlessly” during a disastrous visit she’d made to our house two summers earlier. I had gone off to spend a month by myself writing in a rented room on Cape Cod; at the end of the month, as prearranged, Josie had come out from Chicago for a week’s vacation. On the Falmouth beach one afternoon a week after my arrival, I’d met a Boston University senior, a quiet, easygoing, plainish girl, an elementary-education student who was waiting on tables at a seafood house; soon we were sleeping together and spending her afternoons off walking the beach and swimming. Her boyfriend wanted to marry her when she graduated but she wasn’t sure marriage was a good idea; I told her that I had a friend coming to visit whom I didn’t want to see either. Our troublesome, ambiguous affairs were what we mostly had in common, that and desire for a brief respite from their problems. We were able to say goodbye relatively easily, but when I drove to
Boston to pick Josie up at the airport and take her back down to the Cape, the aftershock of the agreeable few weeks with the B.U. girl, the sense of loss I felt for someone I barely knew but with whom things had been so pleasant, was stronger than I could have anticipated, and with Josie I immediately registered my disappointment at the prospect of resuming all the debilitating old quarrels—which, of course, guaranteed their immediate resumption.

  Within seventy-two hours things were as hellish as they’d ever been, and we called it quits and drove to New York. She was going to finish out the week in a hotel there, seeing the sights on her own, while I went on to New Jersey—to Moorestown, near Camden, where my father had lately been transferred to manage the Metropolitan’s local district office. I planned to stay in Moorestown for a week before returning to my job in Chicago. Josie knew that Polly had spent Thanksgiving with my family one November and that she had stayed for a part of the Easter break when we were seniors at Bucknell; on the drive down from the Cape, she insisted on knowing why she couldn’t come along—what had made Polly Bates so special? How could I treat her so wretchedly after she’d spent her savings coming all the way to Cape Cod to see me? Wasn’t I grown up enough to introduce to my mother and father the woman with whom I’d lived for a year in Chicago? Was I a man or was I a child? When she wouldn’t stop I wanted to kill her. Instead I took her home with me.

  That she wasn’t Jewish hardly entered into it—neither had Polly been Jewish, but my parents were always cordial to her, had fully expected me to marry her, and, after we went our separate ways to graduate school, asked me often if I knew how she was doing and remembered her affectionately. No, what they saw to frighten them wasn’t the shiksa but a hard-up loser four years my senior, a penniless secretary and divorced mother of two small children, who, as she was quick to explain at dinner the first night, had been “stolen” from her by her ex-husband. While my mother was in the laundry room doing the family wash the next morning, Josie came in with her dirty clothes from her few days on the Cape and asked if my mother minded if she threw them into the machine too. The last thing that my mother wanted anything to do with was this woman’s soiled underwear, but as hopelessly polite as the ideal housewife in her favorite women’s magazines, she said, “Of course, dear,” and obligingly put them into the wash. Then she walked all the way to my father’s office, some three miles away, weeping in despair over what I, with all my prospects, was doing with this obviously foundering woman who bore no resemblance to Polly or Gayle, and certainly none to her. She had seen instantly what was wrong, everything that it had taken months for me even to begin to recognize, every disaster-laden thing from which I was unable to sever myself—and toward which I continued to feel an overpowering, half-insane responsibility. My mother could not be consoled; once again Josie was furious and affronted; and my father, with extreme diplomacy, with a display of gentlemanly finesse that revealed to me, maybe for the first time in my life, the managerial skills for which he was paid by the Metropolitan Life, tried to explain to her that his wife had meant her no harm, that they had been pleased to meet her, but that it might be best for everyone if Philip took her to the airport the next day.

  I was desolated, particularly since what happened was just what I’d expected—this was precisely why I hadn’t wanted her to come with me. And yet on the drive down, when she’d told me how miserable she would be alone in a cheap New York hotel or, worse still, back in hot Chicago, having had, because of me, the worst possible vacation, I had once again been unable to say no—just as I’d been unable to tell her that I hadn’t wanted her to join me for as little as a day when I’d first decided to go off that summer for a month on Cape Cod. I could have spared Josie her humiliation, I could have spared my mother her unhappiness—and myself my mounting confusion—if only I hadn’t been so frightened of appearing heartless in the face of her unrelenting need and everything that was owed to her.

  It was no wonder—though maybe it was nothing less than that, given my enslavement to her sense of victimization—that, when I did get back to Chicago that fall, we were together less and less, and I began to resume a vigorous bachelor life, pursuing Susan Glassman and intermittently dating a perfectly sane editorial assistant for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whom, had I settled in for good in Chicago, I would probably have seen much more of. Bizarrely, had I remained in Chicago, where Josie was installed in her job and her apartment, instead of rushing to put a thousand miles between myself and our hopeless estrangement, she would never have wound up alone in Manhattan, positioned to throw herself on me as all that stood between her and ruination. But not foreseeing that was the least of what I didn’t know, brainy young fellow that I was on my Houghton Mifflin literary fellowship.

  The description in My Life as a Man, in the chapter “Marriage à la Mode,” of how Peter Tarnopol is tricked by Maureen Johnson into believing her pregnant parallels almost exactly how I was deceived by Josie in February 1959. Probably nothing else in my work more precisely duplicates the autobiographical facts. Those scenes represent one of the few occasions when I haven’t spontaneously set out to improve on actuality in the interest of being more interesting. I couldn’t have been more interesting—I couldn’t have been as interesting. What Josie came up with, altogether on her own, was a little gem of treacherous invention, economical, lurid, obvious, degrading, deluded, almost comically simple, and best of all, magically effective. To reshape even its smallest facet would have been an aesthetic blunder, a defacement of her life’s single great imaginative feat, that wholly original act which freed her from the fantasied role as my “editor” to become, if for a moment only, a literary rival of audacious flair, one of those daringly “pitiless” writers of the kind Flaubert found most awesome, the sort of writer my own limited experience and orderly development prevented me then from even beginning to resemble—masterly pitilessness was certainly nowhere to be found in the book of stories whose publication she so envied and to which she was determined to be allied. In a fifteen-page explication of human depravity by one of his garrulous, ruined, half-mad monologists, Dostoevsky himself might not have been ashamed to pay a hundred-word tribute to the ingenuity of that trick. For me, however, it was to become something more fateful than a sordid little footnote to somebody else’s grandiose epic of evil, since by the time she came to confess to me two and a half years later (and, rather as Maureen makes her disclosure to Tarnopol, drugged and drunk, midway through a botched suicide attempt), by the time I learned from her how she had played her trick in Manhattan—as well as how she’d used no contraception in Chicago—we had repeatedly been in court to try to wrest her children back from her first husband. By then her daughter, a harassed, endearing, well-intentioned, ill-educated, emotionally abused girl of ten, was living in our house in Iowa City, and Josie was threatening to stab me to death in my sleep if I should ever attempt to seduce the child, whom in fact I was hoping, literally, to teach to tell time and to read. Needless to say, to this development Dostoevsky might have allowed something more than a mere one hundred words. I myself allowed several thousand words to find an apposite, deserving setting for her scenario in the opening section of My Life as a Man, in the chapter “Courting Disaster,” which purports to be Peter Tarnopol’s macabre fictional transmogrification of his own awful-enough “true story.” For me, if not for the reader, that chapter—indeed the novel itself—was meant to demonstrate that my imaginative faculties had managed to outlive the waste of all that youthful strength, that I’d not only survived the consequences of my devastating case of moral simpletonism but finally prevailed over my grotesque deference to what this wretched small-town gentile paranoid defined as my humane, my manly—yes, even my Jewish—duty.

  The urine specimen that she submitted to the drugstore for the rabbit test was purchased for a couple of dollars from a pregnant black woman she’d inveigled one morning into a tenement hallway across from Tompkins Square Park. Only an hour earlier she’d left my apartment, ost
ensibly for the drugstore, with a bottle in her purse containing her own urine, but as that would have revealed her to be not pregnant, it was useless for her purpose. Tompkins Square Park looked run-down even in those days but was still back then a perfectly safe place, a neighborhood resting spot for the elderly, where they sat in good weather and talked and read their newspapers—more often than not, papers in Ukrainian—and where the local young mothers, many of them very young and Puerto Rican, brought their children to play and run about. After a day of writing, I’d either walk over with my own newspaper—or my Commentary or Partisan Review—to an Italian coffee house on Bleecker Street for an espresso or, when it was warm enough, go down to Tompkins Square Park and read awhile on a favorite bench, read and look around and sometimes jot down a note about what I’d been writing that day, feeling very much the satisfactions of a young man on his own in a big city—to an ex-Newarker, a city far more mythical than Paris or Rome. If I wasn’t as poor as those whose local park this was, I was still scrupulously living on the money that I portioned out to myself each week from the Houghton Mifflin fellowship; with no real desire to live otherwise, I felt perfectly at home loitering unnoticed among these immigrant Americans and their American offspring. I did not think of myself romantically as “one of them,” it wasn’t my style to speak of these people as The People, nor was I doing research—I knew plenty about old-country immigrants without having to study the sociology of Tompkins Square Park. I did think occasionally, however, of how my own family and all of our family friends had evolved from an immigrant existence that had to have shared at least certain elemental traits with the lives of the Tompkins Square Park regulars. I liked the place as much for its uneventful ordinariness as for the personal resonance that it had for me.