The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

by Roth, Philip

  In those after-school hours at the dingy Hebrew School—when I would have given anything to have been outdoors playing ball until suppertime—I sensed underlying everything a turbulence that I didn’t at all associate with the airy, orderly public school where I was a bright American boy from nine to three, a bubbling, energetic unruliness that conflicted head-on with all the exacting ritual laws that I was now being asked to obey devoutly. In the clash between the anguished solemnity communicated to us by the mysterious bee-buzz of synagogue prayer and the irreverence implicit in the spirit of animated mischievousness that manifested itself almost daily in the little upstairs classrooms of the shul, I recognized something far more “Jewish” than I ever did in the never-never-land stories of Jewish tents in Jewish deserts inhabited by Jews conspicuously lacking local last names like Ginsky, Nusbaum, and Strulowitz. Despite everything that we Jews couldn’t eat—except at the Chinese restaurant, where the pork came stowed away in the egg roll, and at the Jersey shore, where the clams skulked unseen in the depths of the chowder—despite all our taboos and prohibitions and our vaunted self-denial, a nervous forcefulness decidedly irrepressible pulsated through our daily life, converting even the agonizing annoyance of having to go to Hebrew School, when you could have been “up the field” playing left end or first base, into unpredictably paradoxical theater.

  What I still can recall from my Hebrew School education is that whatever else it may have been for my generation to grow up Jewish in America, it was usually entertaining. I don’t think that an English Jewish child would necessarily have felt that way and, of course, for millions of Jewish children east of England, to grow up Jewish was tragic. And that we seemed to understand without even needing to be told.

  Not only did growing up Jewish in Newark in the thirties and forties, Hebrew School and all, feel like a perfectly legitimate way of growing up American but, what’s more, growing up Jewish as I did and growing up American seemed to me indistinguishable. Remember that in those days there was not a new Jewish country, a “homeland,” to foster the range of attachments—the pride, the love, the anxiety, the chauvinism, the philanthropy, the chagrin, the shame—that have, for many American Jews now over forty, complicated anew the issue of Jewish self-definition. Nor was there quite the nostalgia for the old Jewish country that Broadway later began to merchandise with the sentimentalizing of Sholom Aleichem. We knew very well that our grandparents had not torn themselves away from their shtetl families, had not left behind parents whom they would never see again, because back home everybody had gone around the village singing show tunes that brought tears to your eyes. They’d left because life was awful; so awful, in fact, so menacing or impoverished or hopelessly obstructed, that it was best forgotten. The willful amnesia that I generally came up against whenever I tried as a child to establish the details of our pre-American existence was not unique to our family.

  I would think that much of the exuberance with which I and others of my generation of Jewish children seized our opportunities after the war—that wonderful feeling that one was entitled to no less than anyone else, that one could do anything and could be excluded from nothing—came from our belief in the boundlessness of the democracy in which we lived and to which we belonged. It’s hard to imagine that anyone of intelligence growing up in America since the Vietnam War can have had our unambiguous sense, as young adolescents immediately after the victory over Nazi fascism and Japanese militarism, of belonging to the greatest nation on earth.

  * * *

  AT MY LUNCH MEETING about “Defender of the Faith” with two representatives from the Anti-Defamation League, I said that being interviewed by them as an alleged purveyor of material harmful and defamatory to the Jews was particularly disorienting since, as a high school senior thinking about studying law, I had sometimes imagined working on their staff, defending the civil and legal rights of Jews. In response, there was neither chastisement nor accusation and nothing resembling a warning about what I should write or where I should publish. They told me that they had wanted to meet me only to let me know about the complaints they had received and to answer any questions I might have. I figured, however, that a part of their mission was also to see whether I was a nut, and in the atmosphere of easygoing civility that had been established among us over lunch, I said as much, and we all laughed. I asked who exactly they thought the people were who’d called in and written, and the three of us speculated as to what in the story had been most provocative and why. We parted as amicably as we’d met, and I only heard from the ADL again a couple of years later, when I was invited by their Chicago branch to participate in an interfaith symposium, cosponsored by Loyola University, on the “image” of Catholics and Jews in American literature.

  After Goodbye, Columbus won the 1960 National Book Award for Fiction and the Daroff Award of the Jewish Book Council of America, I was asked to speak on similar themes before college Hillel groups, Jewish community centers, and temples all over the country. (I was on a Guggenheim in Rome in 1960 and unable to be present for the Daroff Award ceremony in New York. My strongest supporter on the prize jury, the late critic and teacher David Boroff, confirmed the report I got from my friend Bob Silvers—who had been there to accept the award on my behalf—which was that my book had been an unpopular choice, with the sponsors as well as with many gathered together for the ceremony; the year before, another set of judges had given the prize to Leon Uris for Exodus.) When I could get away from university teaching, I took up these invitations and appeared before Jewish audiences to talk and to answer questions. The audiences were respectfully polite, if at times aloof, and the hostile members generally held their fire until the question period had begun. I was up to the give-and-take of these exchanges, though I never looked forward to them. I’d had no intention as a writer of coming to be known as “controversial” and, in the beginning, had no idea that my stories would prove repugnant to ordinary Jews. I had thought of myself as something of an authority on ordinary Jewish life, with its penchant for self-satire and hyperbolic comedy, and for a long time continued to be as bemused privately as I was unyielding publicly when confronted by Jewish challengers.

  In 1962, I accepted an invitation to appear on a panel at Yeshiva University in New York. I felt it a duty to respond to the pronounced Jewish interest my book continued to evoke and I particularly didn’t want to shy away from such an obvious Jewish stronghold; as one of the panel participants would be Ralph Ellison, I was also flattered to have been asked to speak from the same platform. The third panelist was Pietro di Donato, a relatively obscure writer since the success in the thirties of his proletariat novel Christ in Concrete.

  From the start I was suspicious of the flat-out assertiveness of the Yeshiva symposium title—“The Crisis of Conscience in Minority Writers of Fiction”—and its presumption, as I interpreted it, that the chief cause of dissension over “minority” literature lay not in the social uncertainties of a minority audience but in a profound disturbance in the moral faculties of minority writers. Though I had no real understanding of seriously observant Jews—a group nearly as foreign to me as the devoutest Catholics—I knew enough not to expect such people, who would comprise most of the Yeshiva faculty and student body, to be supporters of my cause. But since the discussion would be held in a university auditorium—and I was very much at home in such places—and inasmuch as I had been invited not to address a narrowly Jewish subject on my own but to investigate the general situation of the minority writer in America with an Italian-American writer whom I was curious to meet and a highly esteemed black writer of whom I was in awe, I didn’t foresee just how demoralizing the confrontation could be.

  I came East from Iowa with Josie, and on the evening of the symposium the two of us took a taxi out to Yeshiva with my new Random House editor, Joe Fox, who was eager to hear the discussion. Random House was publishing Letting Go, my second book, later in the year, but as Goodbye, Columbus had been published by Houghton Mifflin, Joe had h
ad no direct involvement with those inflammatory stories and, as a gentile, was removed from the controversy and perplexed by its origins. Josie was, of course, gentile also, but after our marriage, on her own steam—and against my better judgment, not to mention my secular convictions—she had taken religious instruction from Rabbi Jack Cohen at the Reconstructionist Synagogue in Manhattan and been converted by him to Judaism. We were first married in a civil ceremony—with only two friends for witnesses—by a justice of the peace in Yonkers; several months later Jack Cohen married us again, at his synagogue, in a religious ceremony attended by my parents. The second ceremony struck me—and perhaps struck my parents, who were too bewildered, however, to be anything but polite—as not only unnecessary but, in the circumstances, vulgar and ludicrous. I participated so that her pointless conversion might at least appear to have some utilitarian value, though my consent didn’t mean that it wasn’t distressingly clear to me that this was one more misguided attempt to manufacture a marital bond where the mismatch was blatant and already catastrophic. To me, being a Jew had to do with a real historical predicament into which you were born and not with some identity you chose to don after reading a dozen books. I could as easily have turned into a subject of the Crown by presenting my master’s degree in English literature to Winston Churchill as my new wife could become a Jew by studying with Jack Cohen, sensible and dedicated as he was, for the rest of her life.

  I saw in her desire to be some sort of simulated Jew yet another distressing collapse of integrity; something very like the self-hatred with which I had been stigmatized seemed to impel her drive to camouflage the markings of her own small-town, Middle Western past by falsifying again her affiliation with me and my background. I introduce this story not so as to have one more go at Josie but to reveal a bizarre irony of which I was not unconscious while the spanking-new Jew of unmistakable Nordic appearance sat in the Yeshiva audience looking on at the “excommunication” of the Semitic-featured young writer whose seventeen years as his parents’ child in the Weequahic neighborhood couldn’t have left him more inextinguishably Jewish.

  The trial (in every sense) began after di Donato, Ellison, and I had each delivered twenty-minute introductory statements. Ellison rambled on easily and intelligently from a few notes, di Donato winged it not very logically, and I read from some prepared pages, thus allowing me to speak confidently while guarding, I thought, against an interrogator’s altering the context in which my argument was being made; I was determined to take every precaution against being misunderstood. When the moderator began the second stage of the symposium by questioning us about our opening statements, the only panelist he seemed truly interested in was me. His first question, following di Donato’s monologue—which would have seemed, had I been moderating, to require rigorous clarification—was this: “Mr. Roth, would you write the same stories you’ve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?”—a question that was to turn up some twenty years later in The Ghost Writer, asked of Nathan Zuckerman by Judge Leopold Wapter.

  Thirty minutes later, I was still being grilled. No response I gave was satisfactory and, when the audience was allowed to take up the challenge, I realized that I was not just opposed but hated. I’ve never forgotten my addled reaction: an undertow of bodily fatigue took hold and began sweeping me away from that auditorium even as I tried to reply coherently to one denunciation after another (for we had by then proceeded beyond interrogation to anathema). My combative instinct, which was not undeveloped, simply withered away and I had actually to suppress a desire to close my eyes and, in my chair at the panelists’ table, with an open microphone only inches from my perspiring face, drift into unconsciousness. Ralph Ellison must have noticed my tenacity fading because all at once I heard him defending me with an eloquent authority that I could never have hoped to muster from halfway out to oblivion. His intellectual position was virtually identical to mine, but he was presenting it as a black American, instructing through examples drawn from Invisible Man and the ambiguous relationship that novel had established with some vocal members of his own race. His remarks seemed to appear to the audience far more creditable than mine or perhaps situated the audience so far from its real mission as to deflate or deflect the inquisitorial pressure that I had envisioned mounting toward a finale that would find me either stoned to death or fast asleep.

  With me relegated pretty much to the sidelines, the evening shortly came to an end. From the moderator there were genial good wishes for the panelists, from the spectators there was some scattered applause, and then we all started down off the stage by the side stairs leading into the house. I was immediately surrounded by the element in the audience most antagonistic to my work, whom Ellison’s intercession had clearly curtailed only temporarily. The climax of the tribunal was upon me, and though I was now wide awake, I still couldn’t extricate myself that easily from their midst. Standing in the well between the hall and the stage, with Joe and Josie visible beyond the faces of my jury—though in no conceivable way my Jewry—I listened to the final verdict against me, as harsh a judgment as I ever hope to hear in this or any other world. I only began to shout “Clear away, step back—I’m getting out of here” after somebody, shaking a fist in my face, began to holler, “You were brought up on anti-Semitic literature!” “Yes,” I hollered back, “and what is that?”—curious really to know what he meant. “English literature!” he cried. “English literature is anti-Semitic literature!”

  In midtown Manhattan later, Josie, Joe, and I went to have something to eat at the Stage Delicatessen, down the street from the hotel where we were staying. I was angry at what I had stupidly let myself in for, I was wretchedly ashamed of my performance, and I was infuriated still by the accusations from the floor. Over my pastrami sandwich no less, I said, “I’ll never write about Jews again.” Equally ridiculously, I thought that I meant it, or at least that I should. I couldn’t see then, fresh from the event, that the most bruising public exchange of my life constituted not the end of my imagination’s involvement with the Jews, let alone an excommunication, but the real beginning of my thralldom. I had assumed—mostly from the evidence of Letting Go—that I had passed beyond the concerns of my collection of apprentice stories and the subjects that had fallen so naturally to me as a beginning writer. Letting Go, about the unanticipated responsibilities of young adulthood far from Jewish New Jersey, seemed to foreshadow the direction in which new preoccupations would now guide me. But the Yeshiva battle, instead of putting me off Jewish fictional subjects for good, demonstrated as nothing had before the full force of aggressive rage that made the issue of Jewish self-definition and Jewish allegiance so inflammatory. This group whose embrace once had offered me so much security was itself fanatically insecure. How could I conclude otherwise when I was told that every word I wrote was a disgrace, potentially endangering every Jew? Fanatical security, fanatical insecurity—nothing in my entire background could exemplify better than that night did how deeply rooted the Jewish drama was in this duality.

  After an experience like mine at Yeshiva, a writer would have had to be no writer at all to go looking elsewhere for something to write about. My humiliation before the Yeshiva belligerents—indeed, the angry Jewish resistance that I aroused virtually from the start—was the luckiest break I could have had. I was branded.

  Now Vee May Perhaps to Begin

  The summer house that May Aldridge and I rented was on a quiet blacktop road in the center of Martha’s Vineyard, a few minutes’ walk from the general store in West Tisbury. It was a small, undistinguished house, comfortable enough, though with the exception of the double bed furnished almost exclusively with faded old beach chairs. The windows were bare when we moved up from New York in late June of 1967, and May drove to the cut-rate store in Vineyard Haven and bought fabric to make curtains. An independent woman of thirty-four whose substantial income derived from a family trust fund, she really didn’t have to sit down and sew curtains together out of inexpensive yard
goods in order to make ends meet; but at the time I was hardly rich, and we were sharing the house on the assumption that we’d live in it as though we were two people with the same modest means. May managed this simply enough, not only because of her accommodating character (or because we were in love), but because the challenge of her adult life had been to loosen the inhibiting bond between herself and the manner to which she’d been born, in which she was rooted, and by which she’d been left distressingly vulnerable, with too little confidence in her good, clear mind, and unable to animate in a sustained way the passionately felt side of an obliging nature.