The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

by Roth, Philip

  I wonder if you have any real idea of what it’s like to be disowned by a dying father because of something you wrote. I assure you that there is no equivalence between that and a hundred nights on the rack at Yeshiva. My father’s condemnation of me provided you, obviously, with the opportunity to pull out all the stops on a Jewish deathbed scene; that had to have been irresistible to a temperament like yours. Nonetheless, knowing what I now do about your father’s enthusiasm for your first stories and about the pride he took in their publication, I feel, whether inappropriately or not, envious, cheated, and misused. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you at least be mildly disturbed to learn, say, that Josie had been inflicted on you for artistic reasons, that the justification for your misery stemmed solely from the requirements of a novel that wasn’t even your own? You’d be furious, more furious even than you were when you thought she’d landed on you out of the blue.

  But I’m fixed forever as what you’ve made me—among other things, as a young writer without parental support. Whether you ever were what you claim to have been is another matter and requires some investigating. What one chooses to reveal in fiction is governed by a motive fundamentally aesthetic; we judge the author of a novel by how well he or she tells the story. But we judge morally the author of an autobiography, whose governing motive is primarily ethical as against aesthetic. How close is the narration to the truth? Is the author hiding his or her motives, presenting his or her actions and thoughts to lay bare the essential nature of conditions or trying to hide something, telling in order not to tell? In a way we always tell in order also not to tell, but the personal historian is expected to resist to the utmost the ordinary impulse to falsify, distort, and deny. Is this really “you” or is it what you want to look like to your readers at the age of fifty-five? You tell me in your letter that the book feels like the first thing you have ever written “unconsciously.” Do you mean that The Facts is an unconscious work of fiction? Are you not aware yourself of its fiction-making tricks? Think of the exclusions, the selective nature of it, the very pose of fact-facer. Is all this manipulation truly unconscious or is it pretending to be unconscious?

  I think I am able to understand the plan here despite my opposition to your publishing the book. In somewhat autonomous essays, each about a different area in which you pushed against something, you’re remembering those forces in your early life that have given your fiction its character and also reflecting on the relationship between what happens in a life and what happens when you write about it—how close to life it sometimes is and how far from life it sometimes is. You see your writing as evolving out of three things. First, there’s your journey from Weequahic Jewishness into the bigger American society. This business of being able to be an American was always problematic for your parents’ generation, and you sensed the difference between yourself and those who had preceded you—a difference that wouldn’t have been a factor in the artistic evolution of, say, a young James Jones. You developed all the self-consciousness of someone confronted with the choices of rising up out of an ethnic group. That sense of being part of America merges in all sorts of ways with your personality. Second, there was the terrific upheaval of the involvement with Josie and the self-consciousness this ignited about your inner weaknesses as a man. Third, as far as I can make it out, there’s your response to the larger world, beginning with your boyhood awareness of World War II, Metropolitan Life, and gentile Newark and culminating in the turbulence of the sixties in New York, particularly the outcry there against the Vietnam War. The whole book seems to be leading to the point where these three forces in your life intersect, producing Portnoy’s Complaint. You break out of a series of safe circles—home, neighborhood, fraternity, Bucknell—you manage even to shake off the spell of the great Gayle Milman, to discover what a life is like “away.” You show us where away is, all right, but what’s driving you there you keep largely to yourself, because you either don’t know or cannot talk about it without me as your front man.

  It’s as if you had worked out in your mind the formula for who you are, and this is it. Very neat—but where’s the struggle, the struggling you? Maybe it was easy to get from Leslie Street to Newark Rutgers to Bucknell to Chicago, to leave the Jewish identification behind in a religious sense but retain it in an ethnic sense, to be drawn into the possibilities of goy America and feel that you have all the freedom that anyone else has. It’s one of the classic stories of twentieth-century American energy—out of an ethnic family and then made by school. But I still feel that you’re not telling all that’s going on. Because if there wasn’t a struggle, then it just doesn’t seem like Philip Roth to me. It could be anybody, almost.

  There’s an awful lot of loving gentleness in those opening chapters of yours, a tone of reconciliation that strikes me as suspiciously unsubstantiated and so unlike what you usually do. At one point I thought the book should be called Goodbye Letting Go Being Good. Are we to believe that this warm, comforting home portrayed there is the home that nurtured the author of Portnoy’s Complaint? Strange lack of logic in that, but then creation is not logical. Could I honestly tell you that I dislike the prologue? A subdued and honorable and respectful tribute to a striving, conscientious, determined father—how can I be against that? Or against the fact that you find yourself bowled over, at the verge of tears with your feelings for this eighty-six-year-old man. This is the incredible drama that nearly all of us encounter in relation to our families. The gallantry and misery of your father as he approaches death has so tenderized you, so opened you up, that all these recollections seem to flow from that source. And as for the final paragraph about your animal love for your mother? Quite beautiful. Your Jewish readers are finally going to glean from this what they’ve wanted to hear from you for three decades. That your parents had a good son who loved them. And what’s no less laudable, what goes hand in hand with the confession of filial love, is that instead of writing only about Jews at one another’s throats, you have discovered gentile anti-Semitism, and are exposing that for a change.

  Of course, all that’s been there and apparent right along, even if not to them; but what they need is just this, your separating the facts from the imagination and emptying them of their potential dramatic energy. But why suppress the imagination that’s served you so long? Doing so entails terrific discipline, I know, but why bother? Especially when to strip away the imagination to get to a fiction’s factual basis is frequently all that many readers really care about anyway. Why is it that when they talk about the facts they feel they’re on more solid ground than when they talk about the fiction? The truth is that the facts are much more refractory and unmanageable and inconclusive, and can actually kill the very sort of inquiry that imagination opens up. Your work has always been to intertwine the facts with the imagination, but here you’re unintertwining them, you’re pulling them apart, you’re peeling the skin off your imagination, de-imagining a life’s work, and what is left even they can now understand. Thirty years ago, the “good” boy is thought of as bad and thereby given enormous freedom to be bad; now, when the same people read those opening sections, the bad boy is going to be perceived as good, and you will be given the kindliest reception. Well, maybe that’ll convince you better than I ever could to go back to being bad; it should.

  Of course, by projecting essentially fictional characters with manic personae out into the world, you openly invited misunderstanding about yourself. But because some people get it wrong and don’t have any idea of who or what you really are doesn’t suggest to me that you have to straighten them out. Just the opposite—consider having tricked them into those beliefs a success; that’s what fiction’s supposed to do. The way things stand you’re no worse off than most people, who, as you know, often are to be heard mumbling aloud, “Nobody understands me or knows my great worth—nobody knows what I’m really like underneath!” For a novelist, that predicament is to be cherished. All you need as a writer is to be loved and forgiven by all the people who ha
ve been telling you for years to clean up your act—if there’s anything that can put the kibosh on a literary career, it’s the loving forgiveness of one’s natural enemies. Let them keep reminding their friends not to read you—you just keep coming back at them with your imagination, and give up on giving them, thirty years too late, the speech of the good boy at the synagogue. The whole point about your fiction (and in America, not only yours) is that the imagination is always in transit between the good boy and the bad boy—that’s the tension that leads to revelation.

  Speaking of being loved, just look at how you begin this thing. The little marsupial in his mother’s sealskin pouch. No wonder you suddenly display a secret passion to be universally coddled. But where, by the way, is the mother after that? It may well be that this incredible animal love that you have for your mother, and that you allude to in only one sentence in the prologue, can’t be exposed by you undisguised, but aside from that sealskin coat, there is no mother. Of course it speaks volumes, that coat—it tells nearly everything you need to know about your mother at that point; but the fact remains that your mother has no developed role either in your life or in your father’s. This picture of your mother is a way of saying “I was not my mother’s Alexander nor was she my Sophie Portnoy.” Perhaps that’s true. Yet this image of an utterly refined, Jewish Florence Nightingale still seems to me particularly striking for all it appears to omit.

  Nor have I any idea what’s going on with you in relation to your father, his rise in the world, his fall in the world, his rise again. There’s only a sense of you and Newark, you and America, you and Bucknell, but what is going on within you and within the family is not here, can’t be here, simply because it is you and not Tarnopol, Kepesh, Portnoy, or me. In the few comments you do make about your mother and father, there’s nothing but tenderness, respect, understanding, all those wonderful emotions that I, for one, have come to distrust partly because you, for one, have made me distrust them. Many people don’t like you as a writer just because of the ways you invite the reader to distrust those very sentiments that you now publicly embrace. Comfort yourself, if you like, with the thought that this is Zuckerman talking, the disowned son embittered permanently by his deprivation; take solace in that if you like, but the fact remains I’m not a fool and I don’t believe you. Look, this place you come from does not produce artists so much as it produces dentists and accountants. I’m convinced that there is something in the romance of your childhood that you’re not permitting yourself to talk about, though without it the rest of the book makes no sense. I just cannot trust you as a memoirist the way I trust you as a novelist because, as I’ve said, to tell what you tell best is forbidden to you here by a decorous, citizenly, filial conscience. With this book you’ve tied your hands behind your back and tried to write it with your toes.

  You see your beginnings, up to and including Bucknell, as an idyll, a pastoral, allowing little if no room for inner turmoil, the discovery in yourself of a dark, or unruly, or untamed side. Again, this may be dismissed as so much Zuckermania, but I don’t buy it. Your psychoanalysis you present in barely more than a sentence. I wonder why. Don’t you remember, or are the themes too embarrassing? I’m not saying you are Portnoy any more than I’m saying you are me or I am Carnovsky; but come on, what did you and the doctor talk about for seven years—the camaraderie up at the playground among all you harmless little Jewish boys? In fact, after the prologue and those first two sections, I can see the hero becoming a lawyer, a doctor, a suburban developer—he’s had his literary fling, his maverick fun, he’s had his gentile Polly, and now he’s going to settle down, marry into a good Jewish family, make money, be rich, have three children—and you have Josie instead. So there’s something missing, a big gap—those idyllic sections don’t at all add up to “Girl of My Dreams.” The very end of the little prologue, lyrically evoking the fleshly bond to your mother, tell me, please, how do you get from that to Josie? As you yourself point out, Josie isn’t something that merely happened to you, she’s something that you made happen. But if that is so, I want to know what it is that led to her from that easy, wonderful, shockless childhood that you describe, what it is that led to her from the cozily combative afternoons with Pete and Dick at Miss Martin’s seminar. Your story in Newark and Lewisburg was far from tragic—and then, in an extraordinarily brief period, you became immersed in the pathologically tragic. Why? Why did you essentially mortify yourself in a passionate encounter with a woman who had a sign on her saying STAY AWAY KEEP OUT? There has to be some natural link between the beginning, between all that early easy success, culminating at Bucknell and Chicago, and the end, and there isn’t. Because what’s left out is the motive.

  In the exploits with Polly, the encounter with Mrs. Nellenback, the business with The Bucknellian, there’s no sense that you’re truly dissatisfied and looking for something else. Only glancingly do you touch on your dissatisfactions; even the conflict with your father you treat peripherally, and yet the note of grievance, of criticism, of disgust and satire and estrangement, sounds so powerfully in your fiction. Which am I to believe is the posturing: the fiction or this? Everything you describe in your childhood is undoubtedly still strongly there—the well-brought-up side, the nice-guy side, the good-kid side. This manuscript is steeped in the nice-guy side. In autobiography you seem to have no choice but to document mainly the nice-guy side, the form signaling to you that it is probably wisest to suppress the free exploration of just about everything else that goes into the making of a human personality. Where once there was satiric rebellion, now there is a deep sense of belonging; no resentment but rather gratitude, gratitude even for crazy Josie, gratitude even for the enraged Jews and the wound they inflicted. Of course, you are not the first novelist who, by fleeing the wearying demands of fictional invention for a little vacation in straightforward recollection, has shackled the less sociable impulses that led him or her to become a novelist in the first place. But the fact remains that it wasn’t exactly the nice-guy side that got the Yeshiva people all hot under their tefillin. And what you were tapping there did not come from nothing, even if it looks as though it did here. You were tapping exactly what produced your excruciating need for independence and the need to shatter the taboo. You were tapping what has compelled you to live out the imaginative life. I suspect that what comes somewhat closer to being an autobiography of those impulses was the fable, Portnoy’s Complaint.

  Where’s the anger? You suggest that the anger only developed after Josie, a result of her insanely destructive possessiveness and then the punishment handed out to you in court. But I doubt that Josie would have come into your life at all had the anger not been there already. I could be wrong, but you’ve got to prove it, to convince me that early on you didn’t find something insipid about the Jewish experience as you knew it, insipid about the middle class as you experienced it, insipid about marriage and domesticity, insipid even about love—certainly you must have come to feel that Gayle Milman was insipid or you would never have forsaken that pleasure dome.

  And where’s the hubris, by the way? What’s not here is what it felt like to meet you—you say why, sociologically, Josie might have fallen in love with you, but you don’t say what she might have found appealing about you. It seems to me you relished the way you were and what you did, yet you talk in this veiled way, or not at all, about your qualities: “the exuberant side of my personality.…” How restrained and cool. How tremendously unexuberant. Positively British. You speak of yourself as a “good catch,” but why not be more boastful in your autobiography? Why shouldn’t autobiography be egotistical? You talk about what you were up against, what you wanted, what was happening to you, but you rarely say what you were like. You can’t or you won’t talk about yourself as yourself, other than in this decorous way. When you give the details of how you responded to the news of Josie’s death, you don’t cover anything up to make yourself look good. Yet it seems to me you’re too proper to say why these women we
re drawn to you; at least you act that way here. But obviously it’s just as impossible to be proper and modest and well behaved and be a revealing autobiographer as it is to be all that and a good novelist. Very strange that you don’t grasp this. Or maybe you do but, because of a gigantic split between how you’re sincere as yourself and how you’re sincere as an artist, you can’t enact it, and so we get this fictional autobiographical projection of a partial you. Even if it’s no more than one percent that you’ve edited out, that’s the one percent that counts—the one percent that’s saved for your imagination and that changes everything. But this isn’t unusual, really. With autobiography there’s always another text, a countertext, if you will, to the one presented. It’s probably the most manipulative of all literary forms.

  To move on—when you’re young, energetic, intelligent, you have of course to deny in yourself what you see as being part of the tribe. You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe’s stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that—all those protestations notwithstanding—your self-hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is valuable for a young person. What should he or she have instead—self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It’s not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when those norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces or the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren’t even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance—and perhaps even invigorated the tribe’s health—may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn’t this a bit premature in you, aren’t you really too young yet to have it so fully developed? Personally I tend to trust the novella Goodbye, Columbus, written when you were still in your early twenties, as a guide to your evaluation of the Milmans more than I trust what you care to remember about them now. The truth you told about all this long ago you now want to tell in a different way. At fifty-five, with your mother dead and your father heading for ninety, you are evidently in a mood to idealize the confining society that long ago ceased impinging on your spirit and to sentimentalize people who by now inhabit either New Jersey cemeteries or Florida retirement communities and are hardly a source of disappointment to you, let alone a target for the derisive comedy unleashed first on poor Barbara Roemer and the Bucknellian.