The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

by Roth, Philip

  Actually, if it hadn’t been for residual feelings of responsibility to Helen and her brother, Donald—who by then was an eighteen-year-old high school senior in a Chicago boarding school and who had flown in from Chicago with his father and his father’s aunt to attend the funeral—I would have considered it grossly inappropriate to turn up for the service at Campbell’s, let alone to seem to want to suggest to anyone there that my heart was anything other than flint. I felt precisely like what she’d been telling me I was since the first time we’d broken up in Chicago in 1956: her ineradicable need for a conscienceless, compassionless monster as a mate had at last been realized—I felt absolutely nothing about her dying at thirty-nine other than immeasurable relief.

  Helen and Donald sat between me and their father, a small-town radio-station engineer whom Josie had begun dating as a high school girl when he’d come back home from the service in the mid-forties. Though he was altogether civil at the funeral, he certainly had no reason to like me much, since it was I, exuding impassioned moral zeal, who had taken off after him in the courts when Josie and I returned from Rome in the fall of 1960 and found that her two children, who were supposed to have been domiciled with her ex-husband and his new wife, were living with him alone in a southern Illinois suburban development, the new wife apparently having taken leave of him while we were abroad. The plan that evolved to alter this arrangement, and that finally required the court to implement, was for Josie to recover partial custody of the children, for Donald to board at a private school (toward whose costs I would contribute something), and for Helen to come to live with us in Iowa City, where I had taken a university teaching job in the Writers’ Workshop.

  I had thrown myself with all my energy—and my small cash reserves—into the court battle that ensued, frequently phoning and writing our Chicago lawyer to go over details of the case and doing what I could on holidays and weekends, when the children visited Iowa City, to gain their confidence about the new plans for them, to which their father continued to have strenuous objections. We were also setting the stage for them to spend the summer with us in Amagansett, Long Island. I thought not only that these arrangements would be better for Helen and Donald, who had fallen way behind in school and were now about to witness yet another marital breakup, but that seeing to their welfare might somehow mitigate Josie’s relentless desperation. It was the sort of rescue operation that, however difficult, can grow naturally enough out of a strong and harmonious marriage; in a marriage like ours, beyond reclamation before it had even begun, the pathetic needs of her unhappy children simply furnished a means of remobilizing the forces that had crazily joined us in the first place. My disastrously confused, unaccountable sense of personal obligation was once again activated by the wreckage of her chaotic emotional past.

  In 1975, a journalist for a Jewish community newspaper in a Midwestern city discovered that my “stepson”—as Donald was misleadingly described in the longish article “Papa Portnoy: Philip Roth as a Stepfather”—was a young married truck driver living in a local working-class neighborhood. Donald came off in the piece as a lively, unashamed young fellow, interested in social problems and possessed of the direct, congenial openness you associate with a good community organizer, a job that in fact he filled in his spare time. Donald recalled accurately for the interviewer that our relationship had been both affable and relentlessly pedagogical—as he described it, a “positive” one: “I’ve got to say that if it were not for the positive influence Philip had on my life at that time, I might be in jail today.” He remembered that I had given him books to read, that I’d tutored him one summer for his school entrance exams, and that I also had taught him a little elementary European history after he’d quite innocently delivered himself of some childish, if to me grating, misinformation about the relationship of the Nazis to the Jews in World War II. His sole significant memory lapse had to do with Josie’s funeral: he told the reporter—when the reporter asked—that I hadn’t been there.

  In fact, I was just a seat away from him and, the morning after the funeral, took Donald by himself to breakfast at the old Biltmore Hotel, where we talked about his college plans. He flew back home with his father that day, and I never saw him again, until, that is, the inquisitive journalist sent me his published interview with Portnoy’s stepson, offering me, in an accompanying letter, the opportunity in his paper “to express yourself on the issues raised in the article.” There, along with photographs reprinted from the New York Daily News, of Josie and me at the New York Supreme Court building during the separation proceedings in 1964, was a photograph of Donald in his late twenties, mustached, wearing a cap, and seated at the wheel of his pickup truck.

  After breakfast with Donald, before returning to my Kips Bay apartment—and to the point in my manuscript where I’d been interrupted by Helen’s call—I walked over to Central Park and tried to find the spot where the car was said to have crashed and killed her. It was a splendid spring morning and I sat on the grass nearby for about an hour, my head raised to take the sun full in my face. Like it or not, that’s what I did: gloried in the sunshine on my living flesh. “She died and you didn’t,” and that to me summed it up. I’d always understood that one of us would have to die for the damn thing ever to be over.

  Only a few days after her funeral I made arrangements, virtually overnight, to be a guest at Yaddo, the Saratoga Springs artists’ colony where I’d frequently gone off to write for long stretches between semesters and during the summer, especially before I’d met May, when I was newly returned to Manhattan, alone in a garish sublet apartment, dealing with the alimony battle and barely able to concentrate on anything else. The bus from Port Authority Terminal was for me very much a part of the stealthy, satisfying ritual of leaving Manhattan for the safe haven of Yaddo, and so instead of renting a car, which would have been more in keeping with my new relaxed attitude toward taking a New York cab, I showed up at the bus station in my old clothes and boarded the northbound Adirondack bus, rereading on the long trip up the thruway the rough first draft of the last two chapters of my book. At Yaddo, where there were only seven or eight other guests in residence, I found that my imagination was fully fired: I worked steadily in a secluded hillside cabin for twelve and fourteen hours a day until the book was done, and then I took the bus back down, feeling triumphant and indestructible.

  The Roth family menace, peritonitis, had failed to kill me, Josie was dead and I didn’t do it, and a fourth book, unlike any I’d written before in both its exuberance and its design, had been completed in a burst of hard work. What had begun as a hopped-up, semifalsified version of an analytic monologue that might have been mine, by diverging more and more from mine through its mounting hyperbole and the oddly legendary status conferred by farcical invention upon the unholy trinity of father, mother, and Jewish son, had gradually been transformed into a full-scale comical counteranalysis. Unhampered by fealty to real events and people, it was more entertaining, more graphic, and more shapely than my own analysis, if not quite to the point of my personal difficulties. It was a book that had rather less to do with “freeing” me from my Jewishness or from my family (the purpose divined by many, who were convinced by the evidence of Portnoy’s Complaint that the author had to be on bad terms with both) than with liberating me from an apprentice’s literary models, particularly from the awesome graduate-school authority of Henry James, whose Portrait of a Lady had been a virtual handbook during the early drafts of Letting Go, and from the example of Flaubert, whose detached irony in the face of a small-town woman’s disastrous delusions had me obsessively thumbing through the pages of Madame Bovary during the years I was searching for the perch from which to observe the people in When She Was Good.

  In my Yaddo cabin I gave the babbling book’s last word to the desperately clowning analysand’s silent psychoanalyst. The single line was intended not only to place a dubious seal of authority on the undecorous, un-Jamesian narrative liberties but to have a secondary, mor
e personal irony for me as both hopeful instruction and congratulatory message: “So [said the doctor], now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”

  When I returned to Manhattan, Candida Donadio, who was my literary agent then, got on the phone with my publisher, Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, and in a matter of hours we had all agreed on the terms of a contract guaranteeing me an advance of $250,000. After paying ten percent to Candida and (sweating heavily as I wrote out the checks) giving another seventy percent to my accountant for quarterly tax payments to New York City, New York State, and the IRS, I still had a new balance in my account that was about a hundred times larger than any I’d ever had there in my life. By the next day I had dashed off checks to pay my debts of some $8,000 and had also purchased two first-class tickets on the France, luxury-liner passage to England for May and me; we planned to sublet a London flat for the summer and drive from there to see the English cathedrals and countryside. May told me that I would need a tuxedo to eat my caviar on the ship, and so we went down to pre-chic Barneys on Seventeenth Street and I bought one. She smiled when I tried it on; half meaning it, she said, “I could take you back to Cleveland in that.” “Sure,” I said, “we’d wow ’em at the country club. Especially after my little book comes out.” That was the first and the last I ever heard about taking me back to Cleveland.

  The crossing was an enjoyable masquerade, to which even the ship’s magazine contributed by publishing a photograph of May and me in our evening clothes, identified as “Mr. and Mrs. Philip Roth.” Only when we disembarked and made our way up to London and a suite at the Ritz, from which we began apartment hunting, did the restlessness begin. At my first meeting with an attractive young English journalist whom my English publisher had arranged to have interview me, I offered an invitation, which she gracefully declined, to spend the rest of the afternoon with me in a hotel. I proceeded to have clothes made by three distinguished tailoring establishments, half a dozen suits that I didn’t need, that required endless, stupefying fittings, and that finally never fit me anyway. We went on trips to famously quaint villages, we hunted out the oldest Anglo-Saxon churches, we made love before a huge bedroom mirror in our rented flat, and what I saw in the mirror held no more of my attention than did the quaint villages and antique churches. On English TV I watched Mayor Daley’s police surging through the Chicago streets in pursuit of yippies and other conventioneers, and wondered what the hell I was doing trying vainly to have a good time abroad while the turbulence of the American sixties, which had enlivened both my fiction and my life, looked finally to be boiling over. I wandered down Curzon Street with nothing to do one morning and found myself a Chinese call girl; then May and I headed off to see Salisbury Cathedral, but only after I’d stopped on my way out of London at Dougie Hayward’s exclusive tailoring shop to have a pair of suit trousers refitted that were still fashionably too tight in the crotch.

  Perhaps if May and I had gone back and rented the modest house on the back roads of Martha’s Vineyard and, within the confines of that pleasant, familiar island, among dear friends, let the massive changes trickle slowly in, I wouldn’t have had to experience so pointlessly my turbulence, the upheavals of someone who feels himself all but reborn. An extravagant blowout on the France or at the Ritz, an hour at the Hilton with a petite Hong Kong pro, however symbolically appropriate and pleasurable in passing, had nothing much to do with the potential for personal resurrection that seemed to be promised by the astonishing annihilation of my nemesis, the violent dissolution of the enshackling marriage, and the imminent publication, on a grandish scale, of a book imprinted with a style and a subject that were, at last, distinctively my own. All I did that summer in England was to nick ridiculously away at the carapace of strictures that had kept me resolved and persevering during the years in which I’d impotently raged against Josie’s exactions and, through an enervating process of trial and error, tracked my unexploited resources as a novelist.

  By the time we’d returned to America in September, I had decided to live completely on my own. Now that it was possible in the late Senator Kennedy’s state for me to marry May (or anyone else I chose), the idea was intolerable: I was not about to be reined in right off by, of all things, another marriage certificate. That May, inside a marriage or out, hadn’t the slightest potential for behaving like Josie wasn’t even the point; I simply could not unlearn overnight what the years of legal battling had taught me, which was never, but never, to hand over again to the state and its judiciary the power to decide to whom I should be most profoundly committed, in what way, and for how long. I could not imagine ever again being a husband who was ultimately under their punitive mechanisms of authority, and, however little I may have experienced of genuine fatherhood as a part-time pedagogue helping Josie’s children learn their ABCs, I felt that I could not be a father under their jurisdiction either. The subpoenas, the depositions, the courtroom inquisitions, the property disputes, the newspaper coverage, the legal bills—it had all been too painful and too humiliating and had gone on far too long for me ever again voluntarily to become the plaything of those moral imbeciles. What’s more, I now didn’t even wish to be bound by what had been the countervailing balm to the legacy of marital hatred, the loving loyalty of May Aldridge. Instead I was determined to be an absolutely independent, self-sufficient man—to recapture, in other words, twelve years on, at age thirty-five, that exhilarating, adventurous sense of personal freedom that had prompted the high-flying freshman-composition teacher, on a fall evening in 1956, to go blithely forward in his new Brooks Brothers suit and, without the slightest idea that he might be risking his life, handily pick up on a Chicago street the small-town blond divorcée with the two little fatherless children, the penniless ex-waitress whom he’d already spotted serving cheeseburgers back in graduate school, and who’d looked to him like nothing so much as the All-American girl, albeit one enticingly at odds with her origins.

  Dear Roth,

  I’ve read the manuscript twice. Here is the candor you ask for: Don’t publish—you are far better off writing about me than “accurately” reporting your own life. Could it be that you’ve turned yourself into a subject not only because you’re tired of me but because you believe I am no longer someone through whom you can detach yourself from your biography at the same time that you exploit its crises, themes, tensions, and surprises? Well, on the evidence of what I’ve just read, I’d say you’re still as much in need of me as I of you—and that I need you is indisputable. For me to speak of “my” anything would be ridiculous, however much there has been established in me the illusion of an independent existence. I owe everything to you, while you, however, owe me nothing less than the freedom to write freely. I am your permission, your indiscretion, the key to disclosure. I understand that now as I never did before.

  What you choose to tell in fiction is different from what you’re permitted to tell when nothing’s being fictionalized, and in this book you are not permitted to tell what it is you tell best: kind, discreet, careful—changing people’s names because you’re worried about hurting their feelings—no, this isn’t you at your most interesting. In the fiction you can be so much more truthful without worrying all the time about causing direct pain. You try to pass off here as frankness what looks to me like the dance of the seven veils—what’s on the page is like a code for something missing. Inhibition appears not only as a reluctance to say certain things but, equally disappointing, as a slowing of pace, a refusal to explode, a relinquishing of the need I ordinarily associate with you for the acute, explosive moment.

  As for characterization, you, Roth, are the least completely rendered of all your protagonists. Your gift is not to personalize your experience but to personify it, to embody it in the representation of a person who is not yourself. You are not an autobiographer, you’re a personificator. You have the reverse experience of most of your American contemporaries. Your acquaintance with the facts, your sense of the facts, is much less developed than
your understanding, your intuitive weighing and balancing of fiction. You make a fictional world that is far more exciting than the world it comes out of. My guess is that you’ve written metamorphoses of yourself so many times, you no longer have any idea what you are or ever were. By now what you are is a walking text.

  The history of your education as narrated here—of going out into the world, leaving the small circle, and getting your head knocked in—certainly doesn’t strike me as more dense or eventful than my own as narrated in my bildungsroman, excepting, of course, for the marital ordeal. You point out that something like that experience would eventually become the fate of my unfortunate predecessor, Tarnopol; for this I can’t be sufficiently grateful, though when it came to the Jewish opposition to my writing, I only wish that, like yours, my own occupation would not have pitted me against my family.