The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

by Roth, Philip

  May was a gentile woman at the other end of the American spectrum from Josie. She had been sent off to the best schools by an old-line Cleveland paint-manufacturing family that had achieved enormous financial success, as well as the civic distinction and social prominence that once came automatically to American industrial clans of British stock. Fair and green-eyed and slender, she was the loveliest-looking woman I’d ever known, her beauty as delicate as Josie’s attractiveness, when we’d first met, was stolidly earthbound. It was an appearance as indelibly stamped by privilege as Josie’s had been by her provincial small town. The two women were drastically different physical types from social backgrounds that couldn’t have been much more dissimilar and, as women, so unlike as to seem like representatives of divergent genders. In each, inborn character proclivities appeared to have been carried to a stereotypical extreme by something innately disabling in their social origins, so that where Josie, the daughter of a working-class loser, was blunt, scrappy, dissatisfied, envious, resentful, and schemingly opportunistic, May for many years had camouflaged her uncertainties behind a finishing-school facade of nearly self-suffocating decorum. What they shared were the scars of wounds inflicted by the social mentality governing their upbringing; what had drawn me to them (and, more than likely, them to me) was not that they were members in good standing of their respective bloodlines, solidly entrenched in the world of their fathers, but that they were intriguingly estranged from the very strata of American society of which they were each such distinctively emblazoned offspring.

  During our five years together, May never once suggested that we go out to Cleveland to meet her family, and when her mother visited her every few months in New York, instead of following our usual routine of my joining May for the evening and sleeping overnight at her East Seventy-eighth Street apartment, I would stay at my own place in Kips Bay, which I’d come to use—on the days when I wasn’t away teaching university classes in Philadelphia or Stony Brook—as little more than a writing studio. Of course we understood that it wasn’t just our unmarried state but also my being a Jew that had something to do with why meeting her parents was probably just as well avoided. Neither of us expected anything horrendous to result from the encounter—we simply didn’t see any reason, so long as we were single, to create unnecessary tensions with a family living hundreds of miles away, who themselves seemed more than willing to steer clear of their daughter’s intimate life. My curiosity about May’s Cleveland background couldn’t begin to match my desire to keep the affair from becoming entangled with family concerns; I’d had enough of that.

  I did invite my own parents over from New Jersey one evening to have a drink at May’s apartment and to go out with us for dinner. I wanted them to witness how, with May, my life had been restored and simplified; though they’d never known exactly how lurid my marriage had been, they’d had plenty of intimations, had seen the toll it had taken on me, and, as a result, had suffered terribly. My mother, who was so reassured by good manners and herself socially so proper, found May’s graciousness tremendously appealing and would have been only too happy if, on the spot, May could have magically replaced Josie, to whom it seemed I’d been eternally bonded by the State of New York. Though my father also happened to like May, I think he would have been relieved had I taken up with a kangaroo. After my separation from Josie in 1962, she had traveled down to his office in south Jersey and, in lieu of the alimony payments that she claimed I was failing to make, demanded money from him. When my father told her, correctly, that I was meeting my legal obligations, she berated him for his irresponsibility.

  May’s uptown apartment was large and comfortably furnished without being studiously decorated or at all pretentious; that her possessions, however, reflected so clearly the traditional tastes of her class suggested that she’d always remain interlinked with her origins in a thousand telling ways, regardless of how willingly she allied herself with the social style of my New York friends, most of whom were Jews from backgrounds not unlike my own. As for her friends—people she’d known for years and had sometimes helped with their interior decorating—after a few nights out with them, I had had to tell her that, affable as it all was, those evenings weren’t for me. It turned out that she was herself a little weary of them too, and one day, after lots of encouragement from me, she decided to quit decorating and redecorating those Upper East Side apartments and enrolled at Hunter to finish her undergraduate education; it had been interrupted in 1952, when she’d suffered an emotional crisis at Smith and, at twenty, had returned home to Cleveland to take up, unhappily, a protected, innocuous postdebutante life. Much as I wanted to help her get herself going as a new woman, I had no desire for her to ape Josie and renounce what she was or cut the ties to where she was from, however unwelcome or uneasy I might have found myself there, and especially as what still interested us both lay precisely in the unlikeliness of our connection.

  Though slow to develop because of the sexual wariness that each of us had developed late in our twenties, our earnest physical fervor became in time a source of almost mystifying comfort and happiness. In May’s nudity there was something at once furtive and shy that aroused a kind of tender hunger that I couldn’t remember having felt for years. Hers was the body of a sweet-tempered woman who, in her remotest dreams, could never have feigned pregnancy or intentionally allowed herself to become impregnated in order to foster a scenario to which she was pathologically addicted: to make of herself the helpless female victim and of the man the heartless victimizer. There was no strategy in May’s desire; had there been, she wouldn’t have been quite so outfoxed, as she was in college and again later when she came from Cleveland to live alone in New York, by the wily exploiters of trusting girls. For me, the guilelessness that could be construed in the lines of her body as easily as in her gaze seemed to offer a powerful assurance of integrity, and it was from this that my frazzled virility took heart and my regeneration began.

  * * *

  MAY AND I HAD COME TO RENT houses on Martha’s Vineyard two summers running because of my friendship with Robert Brustein, who was then teaching drama at Columbia and writing theater reviews for the New Republic. Bob and his wife, Norma, lived during the year in a big apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where I’d often gone for dinner when I was new to New York and on my own. It was at the Brusteins’ dinner table that I began to find an appreciative audience for a kind of noisy comedy, and the sort of Jewish subject, that wasn’t like anything in When She Was Good, the book I was writing about Lucy Nelson of Liberty Center, U.S.A. The spirit of my next book, Portnoy’s Complaint, began to materialize as entertainment for Bob and Norma and for the friends of theirs who became my friends, city Jews of my generation, analysands with deep parental attachments, respectable professionals unimpeded by the gentility principle and with a well-developed taste for farcical improvisation, particularly for recycling into boisterous comic mythology the communal values by which our irreducible Jewishness had been shaped. It was an audience I’d lost touch with since I’d left Chicago and begun married life with Josie in Rome, London, Iowa City, and Princeton—an audience knowledgeable enough to discern, even in the minutest detail, where reportage ended and Dada began and to enjoy the ambiguous overlap. Unembarrassed by unrefined Jewish origins, matter-of-factly confident of equal American status, they felt American through their families’ immigrant experiences rather than in spite of them and delighted in the shameless airing of extravagant routines concocted from the life we had all grown up with.

  Far from causing us to feel at the periphery of American society, the origins that had so strongly marked our style of self-expression seemed to have placed us at the heart of the city’s abrasive, hypercritical, potentially explosive cultural atmosphere as it was evolving out of the angry response to the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson, betraying every foreign-policy position by which he’d been sharply distinguished from Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election campaign, had, in only two years, made h
imself the natural target for a brand of contempt that had never, in my lifetime, been vented with such vehement imagination and on such a scale against a figure of such great authority. His own outsized personality seemed, paradoxically, to be the fountainhead for that steamrolling defiance that his politics would come to generate in many of those repelled by the war. There was something boisterous and unconstrainable in him, the potential in his very physique for a kind of mastodon rage, that made him the inspirational impresario as much for the ugly extremes of theatrical combat dividing the society as for the Southeast Asia conflict. To me it always seemed that his was the hateful, looming, uncontrollable presence that, at least initially, had activated the fantastical style of obscene satire that began to challenge virtually every hallowed rule of social propriety in the middle and late sixties.

  What I found, then, in New York, after leaving my wife and moving up from Princeton—where, for as long as I remained on the university faculty, Josie continued to make her home—were the ingredients that inspired Portnoy’s Complaint, whose publication in 1969 determined every important choice I made during the next decade. There was this audience of sympathetic Jewish friends who responded with euphoric recognition to my dinner-table narratives; there was my intense psychoanalysis, which, undertaken to stitch back together the confidence shredded to bits in my marriage, itself became a model for reckless narrative disclosure of a kind I hadn’t learned from Henry James; there was May, a trustworthy, exceedingly tender woman in dire need herself of affectionate attention, with whom a mutual convalescence, grounded in demidomesticity, proceeded at a steady, invigorating pace; and there was May’s unequivocal gentileness, bestowed by her upbringing and revealed by genetic markings that made her as unimpeachably Aryan as I was Jewish, and that it wouldn’t have entered her mind to attempt, like Josie, to disguise or renounce. There was, in other words, a pervasive anthropological dimension to our love affair that delineated just the sort of tribal difference that would empower Portnoy’s manic self-presentation.

  Lastly, there was the ferocity of the rebellious rhetoric unleashed against the president and his war, the assault that Johnson’s own seething cornball bravado inspired and from which even he, with his rich and randy vein of linguistic contempt, had eventually to flee in defeat, as though before a deluge of verbal napalm. It bedazzled me, this enraged invective so potent as to wound to the quick a colossus like Lyndon Johnson, especially after my long, unnatural interlude of personal and literary self-subjugation.

  * * *

  I WAS THIRTY-FOUR in the autumn following that second, splendidly healing Vineyard summer with May and so never quite grasped how close to death I had come, not even when, having begun to feel some strength returning, I asked the surgeon how much more of the fall I was going to miss, cooped up in the hospital. He answered, with a bemused smile, “Don’t you get it yet? You almost missed everything.” I heard his words, I never forgot his words, and yet the experience registered not as my having nearly died but instead as my having met with death and overcome it. I felt as though now I needn’t worry about dying for another thousand years.

  Amazingly, I didn’t see my burst appendix as Josie’s handiwork, probably because the poisons of peritonitis spread through my system without her accompanying barrage of moral indictment. It was a separate ordeal entirely, the denouement of a decade that had posed somewhat preposterous tests of strength, but arising clearly out of a family predisposition toward which it was a relief not to feel a personal antagonism. What had killed two of my uncles, and very nearly, in 1944, killed my father, had tried and failed to kill me. This was the sort of ordeal whose lucky outcome heightens tremendously your respect for the place of chance in an individual destiny; once the cozy part of the convalescence begins, you float buoyantly off on feelings of sentimental kinship with virtually everyone else fortunate enough to have been left living. My life with Josie, by contrast, had isolated me as a case, bizarrely cut off in a bad marriage that wasn’t merely bad in its own way but included among its hazards the oft-repeated threat of murder. I felt strong and lucky, like a human being among human beings, for having survived peritonitis; I would never know what to make of myself for having endured and survived my wife, though not for lack of thinking about it. For years afterward I was to think and brood and fictionalize obsessively about how I had made Josie happen to me. And it’s become apparent, while writing this, that I’m all too capable of thinking about it still.

  Every evening at dinnertime May came to the hospital to see me; during the day she had her Hunter classes and also worked part-time as a draft counselor with a Quaker group in Murray Hill, advising draft-age young men about the alternatives to military service. The job was hardly congenial to her temperament, but the war had mobilized her indignation in an unforeseen way. She was not the only American discovering in herself the power to oppose; however, as someone for whom taking the public steps that counted one among the opposition did not come easily, she wasn’t overjoyed by what conviction sometimes demanded of her, such as having to phone the Cleveland banker who oversaw her trust fund and requesting of that ultraconservative gentleman and family friend that her portfolio be divested of “war stocks” like Dow Chemical. It was irresistible, of course, for her old Manhattan friends to see in this transformation of a polite, retiring society heiress nothing more “political” than the overbearing influence of me and my friends. And it’s true that on her own, in her old world, May Aldridge might not have turned spontaneously into a dedicated antiwar worker; nonetheless, it wasn’t really any position of mine that influenced her so much as the confidence inspired by the affair itself, generating in her a belief that she (who had been stuck so long in what had felt like an unalterable existence gathering swatches for other people’s upholstery) could hope to help change, right along with her own fate, the American war policy. Because she was being stirred into action on virtually every front, the last traces of self-protective meekness largely disappeared, and something touchingly animated and akin to the furtiveness that I found so stirring in her nudity turned her characteristic placidity into genuine composure, with a power and effectiveness of its own.

  A month after my emergency appendectomy I was released from the hospital and then, two weeks later, unexpectedly readmitted, this time for the removal of the stump of the blown appendix, which had failed to atrophy and had become infected. It was to be another thirty days before I came out for good, as thin as I’d been as a junior in high school but healthy at last. With May I went down to a tiny island off the west coast of Florida to recuperate for a couple of weeks. We stopped off to have lunch in Miami Beach, where my parents were wintering in an apartment they’d taken in the same complex as some of their old Newark friends, and then in a rented car we drove across to Fort Myers and out over the causeway to Captiva. There wasn’t much to do there: we strolled the beaches with the elderly people who were out collecting shells, there were pelicans to watch, dolphins swam by, and a couple of mornings we went to the bird sanctuary with our lunch and followed the cormorants with field glasses. I was bored and edgy a lot of the time, impatient now with the enforced idleness of an extended bout of ill health and eager to get back to writing. A new book was well under way, and I was afraid of losing the galloping pace that had got me going. A section entitled “Whacking Off” had appeared in Partisan Review; Ted Solotaroff, who’d just begun New American Review, had featured another section in his first issue and wanted to publish more; and my Random House editors, Joe Fox and Jason Epstein, had read a rough first draft and told me I was on to something. I wanted to get back to work, Ted wanted me to get back to work, Jason and Joe wanted me to get back to work, but probably nobody wanted me to get back and finish what I’d begun quite as much as Josie: the rumor in New York publishing circles—and Josie was working finally at a publishing job—was that my new novel, if it was anything like what Solotaroff, Epstein, and Fox were saying, would command a large advance.

  * * *


  BY THE TIME I’d fallen ill in the autumn of 1967, the worst of my separation seemed to be over. It was five years since I’d left Josie, and though she still refused to divorce me and planned to take me back to court in the new year to try for a second time to get the alimony of $125 a week increased, I had not seen her outside a courtroom, and it was a long while since she’d telephoned during the day to tell me how wicked I was or in the middle of the night, generally after too much drink, to announce, “You’re in bed with some Negress!” When I moved from Princeton to Manhattan, after finally leaving her in the last weeks of 1962, she followed suit some eight months later; she hoped to resume the plan interrupted by our marriage—to work in publishing—while simultaneously she wanted me to support her, a goal best pursued in the state where I was domiciled and where antiquated divorce laws made it likely that, if she continued to prefer it that way, I would legally remain her husband forever.

  She could also better keep track of my whereabouts in New York than she could back in Chicago, close to where her two children were now in boarding schools, supported by the aunt and uncle of her first husband. For instance, one night when Helen, her twelve-year-old daughter, came East during a vacation to visit her mother, I arranged to take the girl to dinner and to the theater. While we waited in our seats for the play to begin, I was served from the aisle with a subpoena. I immediately recognized the polite gentleman who was serving me; previously he had served me politely while I was at the dentist’s. Pretending to Helen that the envelope I’d been handed was something that I was expecting to be delivered at the theater, I thanked him and slipped it into my jacket pocket. During the intermission, while Helen was in the lobby having an orange drink, I went to the men’s room, where, in a stall, I opened the envelope and read the subpoena. I could barely contain my fury. The subpoena, summoning me to court to face another alimony challenge, could have been served on me in my apartment any day of the week: I had a university teaching job and, after months in a New York sublet, I clearly wasn’t about to skip town. Nonetheless, Josie had arranged to have me served while I was out entertaining Helen, as though her daughter hadn’t been sufficiently scarred by all the sexual battling she’d seen and as though my own capacity to show the child a good time might not be strained by an unanticipated announcement of yet another resumption of our conflict.