by Roth, Philip
(Polly, by the way—was she an addict too? Those martinis you talk about. But perhaps I’m overreaching to make the point, to find the pattern. You seem to paint an accurate picture of her, actually—the sweet girl out of the first romance. Another fatherless daughter, however. The only one without an addiction and with a strongly present and powerful father was Gayle Milman, our Jewish girl from suburban New Jersey. She was the most highly sexed and went on, as you say, to have an adventurous, defiant, confident career as the most desirable expatriate in all of Europe. She wouldn’t have needed you as a crutch. Never. She needed you as a cock. So you dumped her for addicted Josie. Explain that.)
Even if I’m wrong and May was nothing like I suggest, you yourself don’t begin to give a proper portrait of her. You don’t appear to have the heart—the gall, the guts—to do in autobiography what you consider absolutely essential in a novel. You won’t even say here, as you might so easily, in a footnote or just in passing, “I find it inhibiting to write about May. Even though her name has been changed, she’s still alive and I don’t want to hurt her, and so her portrait will have an idealized cast to it. It is not a false portrait but it is only half a portrait.” Even that is beyond you, if it has even occurred to you. She is so vulnerable, this May, that even saying that might wound her horribly. But what is it you respond to in these wounded women you struggle in vain to restore to health? That they’re too helpless to dare turn you away? Yet why would that be so with the kind of loving mother you describe here? Unless you are idealizing your mother too, and there we have another half portrait of another half person. (Unless you have falsified everyone!) Maybe in taking care of these women you are taking care of yourself, convalescing from your battles, and the reason you start backing away in the end, as you did with May, is because you’re backing away from the convalescence, because you are for the time being feeling recovered. Maybe what you are attracted to more than the dependency is the extremeness of these women, the intensity of their condition. I repeat: the things that wear you down are also the things that nurture your talent. Yes, there is mystery upon mystery to be uncovered once you abandon the disguises of autobiography and hand the facts over for imagination to work on. And no, the distortion called fidelity is not your métier—you are simply too real to outface full disclosure. It’s through dissimulation that you find your freedom from the falsifying requisites of “candor.”
Nor do you happen to fool me by suddenly bringing in a ringer to corroborate your “facts”: Fred Rosenberg writes this, Mildred Martin has recorded that, Charlotte Maurer remembers the following, the article “Portnoy as Poppa” furnishes confirmation of such-and-such—as though a few handpicked witnesses to virtually nothing will make us believe everything else.
I’m not saying that this is a conventional, self-congratulatory celebrity autobiography. I’m not saying that the primitive, prehistorical scene of you sitting near the site of Josie’s violent death, a happy widower being warmed by the sun, is what you ordinarily get in people’s autobiographies. But nonetheless this is still, by and large, what you get if you get Roth without Zuckerman—this is what you get in practically any artist without his imagination. Your medium for the really merciless self-evisceration, your medium for genuine self-confrontation, is me.
But you know as much, and nearly say as much, in a sentence near the end of your letter. “This isn’t to say,” you explain, “that I didn’t have to resist the impulse to dramatize untruthfully what was insufficiently dramatic, to complicate the essentially simple, to charge with implication what implied very little—the temptation to abandon the facts when those facts were not as compelling as others I might imagine if I could somehow steel myself to overcome fiction-fatigue.”
Well, you resisted the tempting impulse, all right, but to what end? Whether the task was worth the effort is something you had better consider thoroughly before submitting the book for publication. By the way, if I were you (not impossible), I would have asked myself this as well: if I could admit into autobiography that part of me—and of Polly and May, and of Momma and Poppa and Sandy—that I can admit into a Zuckerman novel; if I could admit into autobiography the inadmissible; if the truly shaming facts can ever be fully borne, let alone perceived, without the panacea of imagination. Ergo mythology and dream life, ergo Greek drama and modern fiction.
I will leave you with the comments—and late-night concerns—of another reader, my wife. All evening she has sat, engrossed in your manuscript, across from the desk where I am writing to you. As you know better than anyone, Maria Freshfield Zuckerman is a child of the English landless gentry, country-reared, Oxford-educated, a good-looking dark-haired woman of twenty-eight, nearly my height, seventeen years my junior, and the embodiment of a cultural background markedly different from yours and mine. She has a daughter from her previous marriage, Phoebe, a sweet and placid four-year-old, and she is nearing the end of the eighth month of pregnancy with our first child. Maria remains very much the dutiful daughter of a well-born mother living in a Gloucestershire village, a woman without a trace of philo-Semitism, even if she has managed so far to be scrupulously tactful with me. Mrs. Freshfield’s distaste for Jews generally—about which Maria’s envious, unstable older sister, Sarah, had made a point of being utterly tactless—was the cause of a nearly disastrous misunderstanding between Maria and me earlier in my stay here. Since then I have made up my mind to ignore her mother’s bias and her sister’s resentment so long as neither indulges herself in my presence. If, among her neighbors in the charming village of Chadleigh, Mrs. Freshfield bemoans my “Mediterranean” looks—her response to my photograph some months before the wedding—that I view as no concern of mine.
As for my beard, its purpose is not, as Maria contends it is, to make me even more unmistakably Semitic than I already am. To begin with, when I gave up shaving three months back, I had no idea that a rabbinical appearance would be the result. If anything, the seemingly inconsequential decision to live for a while as a bearded man would seem to have to do with the fact that at forty-five I am finally on the brink of becoming a father. Marrying for the fourth time, abandoning my New York apartment and buying for the long term (and substantially reconstructing) this large London house backing onto the Thames, settling down as an expatriate in the middle of Maria’s very English life—it’s all this, I believe, that moved me to mark myself symbolically as a middle-aged man in the grip of a great transformation.
Nonetheless, this morning when I emerged from the bathroom still unshaven, Maria said to me, “You just won’t let that die away.” “What die away?” “Zuckerman amid the alien corn.” “But it’s quite dead as far as I’m concerned.” “How can you pretend to believe that from behind that grisly thing? You will be provocative, won’t you?” “I have no intention of jeopardizing my wonderful new life by provoking anyone. On the other hand, if to bestir the natives requires no more of me than a bearded face…” “The natives couldn’t care less. It’s you bestirring yourself that frightens me. It wouldn’t be helpful to live through that again.” I assured her that we won’t. “It’s an innocuous adornment,” I said, “and means nothing.”
And that was that, I thought, until the arrival of your manuscript, which I read through twice during the day and which Maria finished only an hour and a half ago. Since then she’s been alone in bed, quite beside herself. And, mind you, at dinner her only worry had been the haircut she’d had this afternoon. “He’s always cutting the wrong bits,” she told me—“what is this bit doing so short, for instance?” I suggested she change hairdressers, but she is an appealingly rational, unillusioned pragmatist, admirably pliant and uncomplaining, and she replied, “Well, he does all right two times out of three.” She was slightly more unnerved by our having hired a new nanny last week. With a new nanny, she tells me, you always have a lurking fear that she may be a psychopath, that she just loves torturing children. “I’ve cheered her up by promising her a new clothes dryer,” Maria said. “You have
to do that, you know—nannies have to have new clothes dryers and holidays abroad, otherwise they think they’re with the wrong family.” That was the extent of her apprehension, nearly all of which was feigned. She is a tremendously cooperative woman, tactfully, strategically moderate, and in a crisis reasonable and splendid. It was, as usual, a very pleasant dinner.
Then she read your book, looking up at least fifteen times to tell me what she made of it. I trust the matter-of-fact measure she takes of books; it resembles the way she sizes up people. A sample of her commentary follows, culminating in those distress-laden words that she spoke before rushing off to the bedroom, leaving me to put before you our plea.
1. She located the problem (for her) immediately. “Uh-oh,” she said, only minutes into the book, “still on that Jewish stuff, isn’t he? Doesn’t bode well, does it?” “For us? Doesn’t mean anything either way,” I told her. She didn’t look convinced but said no more. Maria does not repeat herself; that I do she’d pointed out to me when we first met. “Why,” she asked, “do you have to say everything twice?” “Do I?” “Yes. When you want someone to do something, you say everything twice. Obviously you are used to being disobeyed.” “Well,” I said, “even my life hasn’t been entirely without struggle.” “Well, I hardly say things even once.” “I wonder if it has to do,” I said, “with the different ways we originated.” “Those different ways,” she said, “are sometimes all you can think about…”
2. “Always going back to his childhood,” she said of you; then of herself, “I’ve had enough of my childhood, thanks. No more.”
3. An hour passed before she looked up again. “Surely,” she said, “there must come a point where even he is bored with his own life’s story.”
4. I was typing away—a draft of this letter—when I realized she was watching me very closely. Half your manuscript was by then in her lap and the other half spread around on the floor by her chair. “What is it?” I asked. “Well, I don’t see why you writers shouldn’t be narcissistic,” she said; “it seems to me one of the flaws of character that people bring to their jobs.” “We also have that obsessionality,” I said. “Yes,” she replied, “that’s where the real trouble begins.” She’s thinking about my beard, I thought obsessionally.
5. Maria on your nemesis and archenemy. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that at twenty-five he couldn’t stand up to this person who, in animal terms, had so much more fire in her belly. It doesn’t seem strange in any way that he didn’t know how to fight that. People who are civilized are always getting talked into being ways they don’t mean to be by people who are not civilized. People are awfully weak. I know it’s a convenient piece of analytic verbiage that you don’t do things without wanting to. But it discounts the fact that people are also weak and at some point they just acquiesce. I’m afraid I’m an authority on this. He may not like to admit it here, but I think that’s all that that marriage came down to—his weakness.”
6. “Odd. As he construes it, the whole thing is a struggle against all those forces inviting him to lose his freedom. Keeping his freedom, giving it away, getting it back—only an American could see the fate of his freedom as the recurring theme of his life.”
7. On randomness. “Nothing is random. Nothing that happens to him has no point. Nothing that he says happens to him in his life does not get turned into something that is useful to him. Things that appear to have been pointlessly destructive and poisoning, things that look at the time to have been wasteful and appalling and spoiling, are the things that turn out to be, say, the writing of Portnoy’s Complaint. As each person comes into his life, you begin to think, ‘So what is this person’s usefulness going to be? What is this person going to provide him in the way of a book?’ Well, maybe this is the difference between a writer’s life and an ordinary life.” “Only the subject,” I said, “is his formative experiences as a writer. Randomness is not the subject—that’s Ulysses.” “Yes, the facts, as far as he’s concerned as a writer, have to do with who he is as a writer. But there are lots and lots of other facts, all the stuff that spins around and is not coherent or important. This is just such an extraordinarily, relentlessly coherent narrative, that’s all. And the person who is most incoherent, Josie, has to have her incoherence made into a shape by him. All I’m saying, I suppose, is that I’m interested in the things an autobiographer like him doesn’t put into his autobiography. The stuff people take for granted. Like how much you have to live on and what you eat, what your window looks out on and where you go for walks. Maybe there should, at least, be some of what Cicero calls occupatio. You know, ‘I’m not going to talk about this, so I can talk about that,’ and in that way you do talk about this.” “What’s it called?” I asked her. “Occupatio. It’s one of those Latin rhetorical figures. ‘Let us not speak of the wealth of the Roman Empire, let us not speak of the majesty of the invading troops, et cetera,’ and by not speaking about it you’re speaking about it. A rhetorical device whereby you mention something by saying you’re not going to mention it. All I’m wondering is, hasn’t anything ever happened to him that he couldn’t make sense of? Because ninety-nine percent of the things that happen to me I can’t make sense of. But maybe that’s because I haven’t written it all down and don’t have always to be bringing mind to bear upon it, to go around asking myself every day, ‘Well, what does this signify?’ He’s making everything signify something, when in life I don’t believe it does. Mind is simply not the element in life that it appears to be here, not in mine certainly and I’d bet not in his either. I don’t mean that he’s presenting a deceptive image to make himself look terrific, because on the whole, for me, it’s rather the other way. He looks to me awfully narrow and driven and, my God, so pleasureless. He’s certainly not interested in happiness, that’s pretty clear. I’d think that if something doesn’t make great sense in his overall pattern of things, he’s either bored out of his skull or terrified. He looks to me a little like what you used to look like.” “Before being introduced to English randomness.” “Yes,” she said, “to the fact that everything isn’t here to be understood and to be used but is also here because, surprisingly enough, it’s life. Existence isn’t always crying out for the intervention of the novelist. Sometimes it’s crying out to be lived.”
8. Lastly, what you elicited about men and women. “I sometimes think that men have a root neurosis about women,” Maria told me. “It’s really a sort of suspicion, I wouldn’t lay any money on it, but I think that—forgive the childish nature of this remark—but through reading all kinds of books and through experience, I do feel that men are a bit afraid of women. And that’s why they behave as they do. There are plenty of individuals who are not afraid of individual women, of course, and maybe plenty who are not afraid of women generally. But my experience has been that most of them are.” “Do you think,” I asked her, “that women are afraid of men?” “No,” she said, “not in the same way. I’m actually, as you know, afraid of people. But I’m not particularly afraid of men.” “Well, maybe you’re right,” I said, “though ‘afraid’ puts it too strongly.” “Distrustful, then,” Maria said.
When she’d finished reading, I asked the question you’ve asked: should it be published? “If he wants it to be,” she said, “why not?” “Simply because,” I said, “the only person capable of commenting on his life is his imagination. Because the inhibition is just too tremendous in this form. The self-censorship that went on here is sticking out everywhere. He’s not telling the truth about his personal experience. In the mask of Philip he is not capable of doing it. In the mask of Philip he’s too nice. He’s the little boy nuzzling mama’s sealskin coat. It’s no wonder he begins with that.” “As a novelist’s wife who may yet end up as her husband’s subject, I’m not someone who considers niceness on a par with Nazism.” “But it’s surface mining,” I said, “and not much more: in spite of his being very much in control of his defensiveness, the book is fundamentally defensive. Just as having this let
ter at the end is a self-defensive trick to have it both ways. I’m not even sure any longer which of us he’s set up as the straw man. I thought first it was him in his letter to me—now it feels like me in my letter to him. It’s irrelevant to say I don’t trust him when the maneuvering is the message, I know, but I don’t. Sure, he talks so freely about all his soft spots, but only after choosing awfully carefully which soft spots to talk about.” “Well, take heart,” said Maria, “maybe he’ll begin doing the same for you.” “No, what’s motivating his selectivity is strictly self-interest. No, neither his discretion nor his shame enters into his depiction of me. There he is truly free. And where you and I are concerned, he’s not likely ever to be as gentle and taciturn as he is about May and himself. That romance of anthropological contradictions is practically painless, or so he says. Where’s May’s anti-Semitic mother? If she even existed, offstage in Cleveland, bothering no one. Where’s May’s anti-Semitic sister? Nonexistent.” “While mine,” said Maria, able no longer to suppress her anxiety, “mine are virtually around the corner! Mine practically come to bed with us at night! Please, can’t we keep to a theoretical discussion of literature?” “We were. I was pointing to what makes us more interesting than them.” “But I don’t want to be interesting! I want to be left alone with the things that are of no great interest at all. Bringing up a child. Not neglecting an aging parent. Staying sane. Uninteresting, unimportant, but that’s what it’s all about. I accept that one never gets any more from life than adulterated pleasure, but how much longer are we to be bedeviled by his Jewish fixation! I refuse to allow him to make that into a major problem again! I cannot jump, I will not jump, every time the needle moves on his fucking Jewish record! Especially as there is not an ounce of antagonism between you and me, especially as we get on so well—except when he starts up with that! There were those months after the blowup over my mother when everything seemed to have resolved itself, just a lovely long period of quiet and love. What do confrontations on that subject achieve? Who even cares, other than him? I thought your New Year’s resolution was to not make too much of a fuss about that sort of thing. And then comes this beard! Oh, Nathan, do you really think that beard is a good idea? You seem always to feel that you have to explain what nobody is asking you to explain—your right to be, and to be here. But no one needs that kind of warranty from you. Those are—and don’t go for me when I say this—those are very Jewish feelings and frankly I believe that if it weren’t for him you would not have them. I don’t know—do you think it would help to see someone, sort of a psychiatric sort of person, about this Jewish business? To have spent all of this evening reading this book—and now I feel so defenseless against what I just know is coming!”