by Roth, Philip
And now, alone, in the dark bedroom she lies, terrified that we shall never have the possibility of being other than what you, with your obsessive biography, determine; that never will it be our good fortune, or our child’s, to live like those whose authors naïvely maintain that at a certain point the characters “take over” and do the storytelling themselves on their own initiative. What she’s saying is, “Oh, Christ, here he goes again—he’s going to fuck us up!”
Is Maria right? What is coming? Why, in her England, have I been given this close-cropped, wirebrush, gray-speckled beard? Is what began inconsequentially enough now to yield consequences that, however ridiculous, will send us reeling again? How can our harmonious contentment last much longer when the household’s future is being determined by someone with your penchant for dramatic upheaval? How can we really believe that this beard means nothing when you, who have rabbinically bearded me, appear in even just your first few pages to be more preoccupied than ever in your life with the gulf between gentile and Jew? Must this, my fourth marriage, be torn apart because you, in middle age, have discovered in yourself a passion to be reconciled with the tribe? Why should your relentless assessing of Jewish predicaments be our cross to bear!
Who are we, anyway? And why? Your autobiography doesn’t tell us anything of what has happened, in your life, that has brought us out of you. There is an enormous silence about all that. I still realize that the subject here is how the writer came into being, but, from my point of view, it would be more interesting to know what has happened since that has ended up in your writing about me and Maria. What’s the relation between this fiction and your present factuality? We just have to guess that, if we can. What am I doing exiled in this London house with a wife who wants no disturbance in her peaceful life? How much peace am I made for? Her haircuts, the nanny, the clothes dryer—how much more of that intense and orderly domesticity that I once craved can I afford to take? She is indeed making me a “beautiful” existence for the first time in my life, she is an expert in the quiet and civilized and pleasant ways of being, in the quiet and muted life, but what will that make of me and my work? Are you suggesting that without the fights, without the anger, without the conflicts and ferocity, life is incredibly boring, that there is no alternative to the fanatic obsession that can make a writer of a person except these nice dinners where you talk over candlelight and a good bottle of wine about the nanny and the haircut? Is the beard meant to represent a protest against the pallidness of all this—this randomness? Yet suppose the protest bizarrely evolves into a shattering conflict? I’ll be miserable!
Well, there it is. Or there it isn’t. I will let this outburst stand, absurd as I know it must be to expect even my most emotional plea to alter the imaginative course so long ago laid down for you. Similarly, I will not go back and alter what I argued earlier—that your talent for self-confrontation is best served by sticking with me—however much that argument, if persuasive to you, virtually guarantees the unfolding of the worst of our fears. Nobody who wishes to be worthy of serious consideration as a literary character can possibly expect an author to heed a cry for exceptional treatment. An implausible solution to an intractable conflict would compromise my integrity no less than yours. But surely a self-conscious author like you must question, nonetheless, whether a character struggling interminably with what appears to be the necessary drama of his existence is not, in fact, being gratuitously and cruelly victimized by the enactment, on the part of the author, of a neurotic ritual. All I can ask is that you keep this in mind when it is time for me to shave tomorrow morning.
Obligingly yours,
Zuckerman
P.S. I have said nothing about your crack-up. Of course I am distressed to hear that in the spring of 1987 what was to have been minor surgery turned into a prolonged physical ordeal that led to a depression that carried you to the edge of emotional and mental dissolution. But I readily admit that I am distressed as much for me and my future with Maria as for you. This now too? Having argued thoroughly against my extinction, in some eight thousand carefully chosen words, I seem only to have guaranteed myself a new round of real agony! But what’s the alternative?
BOOKS BY PHILIP ROTH
Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
Letting Go (1962)
When She Was Good (1967)
Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
Our Gang (1971)
The Breast (1972)
The Great American Novel (1973)
My Life as a Man (1974)
Reading Myself and Others (1975)
The Professor of Desire (1977)
The Ghost Writer (1979)
A Philip Roth Reader (1980)
Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
Zuckerman Bound (1985)
The Counterlife (1987)
The Facts (1988)
Copyright © 1988 by Philip Roth
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roth, Philip.
The facts : a novelist’s autobiography / Philip Roth. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Roth, Philip—Biography. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
PS3568.O855Z467 1988 813'.54—dc19 [B] 88-14187
Sections of this book first appeared, in slightly different form, in the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, and Vanity Fair
eISBN 9781466846425
First eBook edition: June 2013