The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

by Roth, Philip

  I don’t intend to suggest that my sentimental fondness for Tompkins Square Park should have given Josie pause and sent her instead to look for her pregnant woman in Washington Square Park, only a ten-minute walk from my apartment in the other direction. To the contrary, had she gone anywhere other than Tompkins Square Park, she wouldn’t have been the woman whose imagination’s claim on my own may well have been what accounted for her inexplicable power over a supremely independent, self-assured, and enterprising young man, a stalwart competitor with a stubborn sense of determination and a strong desire to have his own way. The same deluded audacity that made even the least dramatic encounter promising, that had prompted her, probably quite spontaneously, to sign herself into the Chicago hospital as Jewish a mere hundred days into our affair, that had inspired her to hand over to my conventional, utterly respectable mother the dirty underthings that she’d accumulated on her holiday with me, was precisely what pointed her, like a hound dog with the sharpest nose for acerbic irony, to Tompkins Square Park in order to make a responsible man of me—to make a responsible Jew of me: to Tompkins Square Park, where she knew I so enjoyed my solitude and my pleasant sense of identification with my Americanized family’s immigrant origins.

  And a few days later, when she’d accepted my proposal to marry her—on the condition that before the marriage she have an abortion—it was the same instinct that led her to take the three hundred dollars I’d withdrawn from the bank and, instead of going with it to the abortionist whose name I had got from an intern friend, pocket the cash and spend the day in a movie theater in Times Square, repeatedly watching Susan Hayward go to the gas chamber in I Want to Live!

  Yet once she’d “had” her abortion—after she’d come back from the movies to my basement apartment and, in tears, shivering uncontrollably, had told me from beneath the blankets on the bed all the horrible medical details of the humiliating procedure to which I had subjected her—why didn’t I pick up then and run away, a free man? How could I still have stayed with her? The question really is how could I resist her. Look, how could I ever have resisted her? Forget the promise I’d made, after receiving the rabbit-test results, to make her my wife if only she got rid of the fetus—how could I be anything but mesmerized by this overbrimming talent for brazen self-invention, how could a half-formed, fledgling novelist hope ever to detach himself from this undiscourageable imagination unashamedly concocting the most diabolical ironies? It wasn’t only she who wanted to be indissolubly joined to my authorship and my book but I who could not separate myself from hers.

  I Want to Live!, a melodrama about a California B-girl who is framed for murder and goes to the gas chamber. The movie she went to see (instead of the abortionist, for whom she had no need) is also to be found in My Life as a Man. Why should I have tried to make up anything better? How could I? And for all I knew, Josie had herself made that up right on the spot, consulted her muse and blurted it out to me on the afternoon of her confession two years later … even, perhaps, as she invented on the spot—both to make her story more compelling and to torture me a little more—the urine specimen that she’d bought from the black woman in Tompkins Square Park. Maybe she did these things and maybe she didn’t; she certainly did something—but who can distinguish what is so from what isn’t so when confronted with a master of fabrication? The wanton scenes she improvised! The sheer hyperbole of what she imagined! The self-certainty unleashed by her own deceit! The conviction behind those caricatures!

  It’s no use pretending I didn’t have a hand in nurturing this talent. What may have begun as little more than a mendacious, provincial mentality tempted to ensnare a good catch was transformed, not by the weakness but by the strength of my resistance, into something marvelous and crazy, a bedazzling lunatic imagination that—everything else aside—rendered absolutely ridiculous my conventional university conceptions of fictional probability and all those elegant, Jamesian formulations I’d imbibed about proportion and indirection and tact. It took time and it took blood, and not, really, until I began Portnoy’s Complaint would I be able to cut loose with anything approaching her gift for flabbergasting boldness. Without doubt she was my worst enemy ever, but, alas, she was also nothing less than the greatest creative-writing teacher of them all, specialist par excellence in the aesthetics of extremist fiction.

  Reader, I married her.

  All in the Family

  I still don’t think it was innocent of me to have been as astonished as I was at twenty-six when I found myself up against the most antagonistic social opposition of my life, and not from gentiles at one or the other end of the class spectrum but from angry middle-class and establishment Jews, and a number of eminent rabbis, accusing me of being anti-Semitic and self-hating. I hadn’t begun to foresee this as a part of the struggle to write, and yet it was to be central to it.

  As intellectually sophisticated as I was, “self-hatred” was still a new idea to me then; if the phenomenon had ever been present in my world, I had certainly never perceived it as a problem. In Newark, I hadn’t known anyone to whose conduct self-hatred was anything like the key, and the Bucknell chapter of Sigma Alpha Mu, whatever its shortcomings, never seemed to chafe under its distinctive identity or noticeably to apologize for itself. When Moe Finkelstein, one of the Sammies’ two varsity football players, entered the game for Bucknell, his fraternity brothers invariably sent up a whoop signaling their proud affiliation, a demonstration of feeling that would have driven a self-hating Jew into paroxysms of shame. In fact, what was most admirable about the Sammies was the easygoing way in which they synthesized themselves into a manifestly gentile environment without denying their difference or combatively insisting on it. Theirs seemed to me, even then, a graceful response to a social situation that did not always bring out the best in people, particularly in that conformist era.

  And virtually from the day that I arrived in Hyde Park as a graduate student and rented a tiny room in International House, the University of Chicago looked to me like some highly evolved, utopian extension of the Jewish world of my origins, as though the solidarity and intimate intensity of my old neighborhood life had been infused with a lifesaving appetite for intellectual amusement and experimentation. When I began graduate school in September 1954, the university seemed to me full of unmistakably Jewish Jews far less self-conscious and uncertain about themselves, really, than the Irish Catholics from Minnesota and the Baptists from Kansas—Jews wholly secularized but hardly chagrined by a pedigree from which they seemed to derive their undisguised contentiousness, their excitability, and a gift for satiric irony whose flavor I recognized immediately: our family friend Mickey Pasteelnik, Newark’s Apple King, had he enjoyed a literary education, would surely have talked about The Wings of the Dove very much like my ebullient fellow student from Brooklyn, Arthur Geffin. Ted Solotaroff—with whom I profitably debated for years after I returned from the Army in 1956 and entered the Chicago Ph.D. program—remembers us referring to Isabel Archer as a “shiksa.” I recall another conversation, over beer at the University Tavern, where Geffin tended bar at night, in which much scrupulosity was expended determining if Osmond wasn’t really a Jew.

  This was of course so much off-hours kibitzing, but the pleasure that we took in bringing to The Portrait of a Lady what we’d imbibed eavesdropping on our fathers’ pinochle games does suggest something about the playful confidence we had in our Jewishness as an intellectual resource. It was also a defense against overrefinement, a counterweight to the intimidating power of Henry James and literary good taste generally, whose “civilizing” function was variously tempting to clever, ambitious city boys who knew just how casually coarse they could become on a street corner or at a poker game or in the upper deck at Ebbets Field. It seemed less advisable to treat this strain of vulgarity—which we had come to by being both our fathers’ sons and our neighborhoods’ creatures—as an impurity to be purged from our speech than to own up to it matter-of-factly, ironically, unashamedly, and to
take a real, pleasurable satisfaction in what more than likely would have seemed to Henry James to be our unadventitious origins.

  What ignited the Jewish charges against me was the publication in the New Yorker, in April 1959, of “Defender of the Faith,” a story about some Jewish recruits in the wartime Army trying to extract favors from their reluctant Jewish sergeant. It was my second piece of fiction to appear in a large commercial magazine. With the $800 I’d earned from the first story, in Esquire, and an advance from Houghton Mifflin, I’d quit my instructorship at Chicago—and stepped for good (I thought) out of Josie’s life. Intending to live only as a writer, I had moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to that two-room basement apartment that was placed perfectly—given my taste then for urban color—between the bums panhandling on the Bowery and the baskets of bialys on the tables at Ratners. The other stories about Jews that were to be published in the Houghton Mifflin collection, Goodbye, Columbus, though they may have attracted a little more than ordinary reader interest, had caused no furor among Jews, appearing as they did in the Paris Review, a young literary quarterly then with only a tiny circulation, and in Commentary, the monthly edited for years by Elliot Cohen and published by the American Jewish Committee. Had I submitted “Defender of the Faith” to Commentary—whose coeditor at that time, Martin Greenberg, was an early supporter and sympathetic friend—I suspect that the magazine would have published it and that the criticism the story aroused there would have been relatively unspectacular. It’s even possible that the ferment inspired a month later by the publication of Goodbye, Columbus—the pulpit sermons, the household arguments, the discussions within Jewish organizations gauging my danger, all of which unexpectedly dramatized to people who were essentially nonreaders what was, after all, only a first book of short stories—might never have reached troublesome proportions had “Defender of the Faith” been certified as permissible Jewish discourse by appearing in Commentary. And had that happened—had there not been the inflammatory fanfare of the New Yorker exposure, had Goodbye, Columbus had the innocuous cultural fate of a minor critical success—it’s likely that my alleged anti-Semitism might never have come to pervade the discussion of my work, stimulating me to defend myself in essays and public addresses and, when I decided to take things more aggressively in hand, to strike back at accusations that I had divulged Jewish secrets and vulgarly falsified Jewish lives by upping the ante in Portnoy’s Complaint. That was not mistaken for a conciliatory act, and the ramifications of the uproar it fomented eventually inspired me to crystallize the public feud into the drama of internal family dissension that’s the backbone of the Zuckerman series, which began to take shape some eight years later.

  That the New Yorker, like Partisan Review and Commentary, had a Jewish editor, William Shawn, Jewish contributors—like S. J. Perelman, Irwin Shaw, Arthur Kober, and J. D. Salinger—and a sizable Jewish readership would only have suggested, to those I’d incensed, that identifying with the New Yorker’s privileged, unequivocally non-Jewish aura furnished these Jews (as undoubtedly it did Roth himself) with far more sustenance than they derived from their Jewish status. I soon understood self-hatred to mean an internalized, though not necessarily conscious, loathing of one’s recognizable group markings that culminates either in quasi-pathological efforts to expunge them or in the vicious disparagement of those who don’t even know enough to try.

  Because I didn’t have the patience to wait for the author’s copies to reach me by mail, the day that the New Yorker was scheduled to appear I made three trips to Fourteenth Street, to the newsstand across from Klein’s, to see if the issue was in yet. When the magazine finally appeared that afternoon, I bought a copy for myself and another to send off to my parents. While I was at college, they had moved from the Weequahic neighborhood to a small garden apartment in a pleasant little complex in nearby Elizabeth, on the very street where they had been married in 1926 and where nearly every Sunday of my childhood, after visiting my widowed paternal grandmother in one of Newark’s oldest immigrant neighborhoods, we would drive over to see my widowed maternal grandmother, who shared a small apartment there with my maiden aunt. The New Yorker was really no more familiar to my parents than were the other magazines in which my first stories had begun to appear. Hygeia had sometimes come to the house, sporadically we had received Collier’s, Liberty, and the Saturday Evening Post, but the magazines to which my mother was most faithful were Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Woman’s Home Companion. In their pages she confirmed her sense of how to dress and to furnish a house, found the recipes that she clipped and filed in her recipe box, and received instruction in the current conventions of child rearing and marriage. Decorum and courtesy meant no less to her than they did to the heroines of the fiction she read in those magazines, and through her genteel example, my brother and I became well-mannered boys, always a source of pride to her, she said, on special Sunday outings to the Tavern, a family restaurant favored by Newark’s Jewish bourgeoisie (a class in which we, who had neither money, property, nor very much social self-assurance, had really only half a foothold).

  My mother read five or six books a year borrowed from the lending library, not junk but popular novels that had acquired moral prestige, like the works of Pearl Buck, her favorite author, whom she admired personally for the sort of reasons that she admired Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the esteemed Australian nurse who’d brought to America in the forties her therapeutic techniques for treating polio victims. She responded very strongly to their womanly brand of militant and challenging compassion. Her heroine of heroines was Eleanor Roosevelt, whose column, “My Day,” she followed in the newspaper when she could. After her 1922 graduation from Battin High in Elizabeth, my mother, then Bess Finkel, had worked successfully for several years as an office secretary, a very dutiful daughter, living of course at home, who adored her mother and her older sister, feared her father, helped raise two younger sisters, and dearly loved her only brother, Mickey—a musician as well as an art student, and eventually a quiet, unassuming bachelor, soft-spoken and witty, and something of a traveler. Artistic ambition moved him to paint portraits and landscapes but he kept himself alive doing professional photography; whenever he could afford to, he shut his tiny Philadelphia studio and sailed to Europe to tour the museums and look at the paintings he loved. Sandy and I were believed by my mother to derive our artistic proclivities through the genetic strain that had determined my Uncle Mickey’s lonely career, and for all I know she was right. A woman of deep domestic expertise and benign unworldliness, reassuringly confident right up to the outermost boundaries of our social world though progressively, if respectably, uncertain anywhere beyond it, my mother was unambiguously proud of my first published stories. She had no idea that there could be anything seriously offensive about them and, when she came upon articles in the Jewish press intimating that I was a traitor, couldn’t understand what my detractors were talking about. When she was once in doubt—having been shaken by a derogatory remark she’d overheard at a Hadassah meeting—she asked me if it could possibly be true that I was anti-Semitic, and when I smiled and shook my head no, she was entirely satisfied.

  The issues of Commentary and the Paris Review that I’d sent in the mail or brought over with me to Elizabeth when I visited—containing my stories “Epstein,” “Conversion of the Jews,” and “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings”—my mother displayed, between bookends, on a side table in the living room. My father, who mainly read newspapers, was more aggressively exhibitionistic about my published works, showing the strange magazines to anyone who came to visit and even reading aloud to his friends lines in which he thought he recognized a detail of description, a name, a line of dialogue that I’d appropriated from a familiar source. After the publication of “Defender of the Faith,” when I told him on the phone that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith had requested I meet with their representatives to discuss the outcry over my story, he was incredulous. “What outcry? Ever
ybody loved it. What is the outcry? I don’t get it.”

  Perhaps if it had been somebody else’s son against whom these accusations had been leveled by our Jewish betters, neither he nor my mother would have been quite so sure of the writer’s probity, but for them to be wounded as Jews by me—whom they had seen circumcised and bar mitzvahed, whom they had sent for three years to one of our neighborhood’s humble Hebrew schools, whose closest friends were all Jewish boys, who had always, unfailingly, been a source of pride—didn’t occur to either of them and never would. My father could become as belligerent about the charges against my Jewish loyalty as he would be in later years when anyone dared to be dubious about a single aspect of Israeli policy.

  * * *

  I SHOULD ADD that not even he would have rushed to defend my achievements as a student of Judaism or my record of religious observance: at age thirteen I had not come away from three years of Hebrew School especially enlightened, nor had my sense of the sacred been much enriched. Though I hadn’t been a total failure either, and had learned enough Hebrew to read at breakneck speed (if not with full comprehension) from the Torah at my bar mitzvah, the side of my Jewish education that had made that after-school hour, three days a week, at all endurable had largely to do with the hypnotic appeal, in those environs, of the unimpeachably profane. I am thinking of the witless persecution of poor Mr. Rosenblum, our refugee teacher, an escapee from Nazism, a man lucky (he had thought) just to be alive, whom the older boys more than once hung in effigy on the lamppost just outside the window where he was teaching our “four-to-five” class. I’m remembering the alarming decrepitude of the old-country shammes, our herring-eater, Mr. Fox, whom we drove crazy playing a kind of sidewalk handball called “Aces Up” against the rear wall of his synagogue—Mr. Fox, who used to raid the local candy store and pull teenagers at the pinball machine out by the neck in order to scare up enough souls for a minyan. And, of course, I’m remembering the mishap of a nine-year-old classmate, a boy of excruciating timidity, who on our very first day of Hebrew School in 1943—when the rabbi who was religious leader of the synagogue and director of the school began, a bit orotundly, to address us new students in our cubbyhole classroom directly upstairs from the Ark of the Covenant—involuntarily beshat himself, a pathetic disaster that struck the nervous class as blasphemously hilarious.