Philip Roth - Letting Go

Sense … nonsense — how one judges it is unimportant. It simply seemed like the next step. At least, I began to think, the next step someone else might have taken.

When I came out of the meeting, I stood in the doorway of Cobb Hall a moment, expelling from my lungs the stale fumes of the afternoon. I watched the last few windows blacken, one by one, in the laboratories and classrooms that faced out onto the quadrangle. It was nearly six, and the white tennis courts had a simple geometric grace under the dark sky. The Gothic archways attested to the serious purpose of the place and made me want to believe that we were all better people than one would suppose from the argument we had just had. Just before our session had ended, there had been a short, fierce combat between two of our members. Paul Herz had given an A-minus to a paper John Spigliano had marked D. It was the first time since his arrival that Paul had spoken up, and, provoked by John, he had unfortunately lost his temper. On the way out, Ben Harnap had said to me, shaking his head, “Well, your friend’s one of those angry young men, all right,” while Paul had simply charged by all of us, not saying good night. Earlier John had referred with little reverence to Paul as “a creative writer,” and Paul finally had hit the table and said that John Spigliano must hate literature — otherwise why would he want to strangle it so? “At least there’s a little life in this essay,” Paul had said, his fury riding out of him at last, leaving him a little crumpled-looking in his chair. “The presence of life, or liveliness,” John had replied, “by which I take it you mean a few turned phrases, may be a winning quality in the daily newspaper, but I don’t know if it’s what we’re trying to teach students in this course.” “What are we trying to teach them?” “We’re not educating their souls,” said John; to which Paul replied, loudly, “Why not?” Just before the end of the meeting — just before I had spoken my piece — John had said to all of us, charmingly almost, “We take up style in the last quarter, and perhaps Paul could lead the discussion for us then. If we have a creative writer on the staff, I certainly hope we’ll be able to take advantage of his specialty.” Paul Herz had mumbled as an answer, “I wasn’t talking about style.”

There had been nothing elevated about the exchange, and during it the rest of us had remained silent. Two opposite natures had met and collided before us, and so quickly had it happened that I did not even know what to think or to do. In fact, at the very moment it broke out, my mind had been spinning and spinning in its own direction. I was hearing Libby speak. She was telling me again what she had told me that afternoon a week before, just prior to our entering Brooks. She was saying that Paul was happier, and so she was happier too. Her husband was able to write through the afternoon (when staff meetings didn’t intervene), and when she got in from work at five-fifteen, she found that he had set the water to boil for the vegetables and seasoned the meat. Eyes swelling with tears, she had told me that a change had taken place in Paul; ever since Reading and her stay in the hospital, he had been both a doctor and a servant to her. In the mornings he rose and squeezed orange juice and brought it to her bed. He walked with her to the I. C. station, and home again on the evenings when she had a class downtown. Order, said Libby, method, plan, accomplishment — all this gave meaning now to their days. There was this and there was that, but whether there was passion, whether there was pleasure and love, she had not made entirely clear. What was clear was simply that after our visit to Brooks, what had once existed between us seemed to exist again. As for the impassioned plea that I visit Paul’s parents, and my decision to do so, what else was that but a last-ditch effort at hiding from the truth?

Marry Libby? I asked myself, while across the table it seemed as though her husband had just launched a campaign to lose his job. It was at this point that Peggy Moberly had nervously raised her hand and said that perhaps Paul and John were both right; she proposed that the student be given two grades, one for content, another for form. Victor Honingfeld instantly rose in his chair to say that he did not see how anybody could fail to understand that content-and-form, like good-and-evil, were one. Mona Meyerling, mother and father to us all, said that she for one did value liveliness, and felt it should influence the grade, but that she was not really certain that this particular paper was that lively — to give the student an A would perhaps only encourage him in his grammatical abuses. Most everyone had a go at the paper by then — as the tension in the room decreased — except Bill Lake, whose temperament and history made him a kind of open city in our midst, someone who need enter no battles. And except for me.

Sam McDougall, who had come out strongly for Spigliano — and had that personal interest in my grammatical education — now turned in his seat and looked in my direction. Paul was looking at me too; so was John. I opened my mouth, and after making a rather long-winded and dull introductory statement, I wound up hearing myself say that though I had originally given the paper a C, I thought that what Paul had said made a good deal of sense. I said I didn’t mind a dozen misspellings (“Thirteen,” Sam whispered to me, as he watched my ship drift out to sea) or that the dash was overused. I reminded everyone of Tristram Shandy. I said I disagreed with John in not finding the structure quite so primitive as he had argued it to be. I wanted to change my mark, I added, pointing to the board where the grades were tallied; I would come up to a B or a B-plus. “Actually,” I heard Charleen Carlisle say, a moment later, “I’d come up to a B.” And Swanson, with a look of great seriousness on his face, said he might see his way clear to a B-minus. At this point John stepped in to quiet the revolt, while beside me, his face drained of blood, Sam McDougall was suffering one of the crises of his life. Shortly thereafter — John having made his final reference to Paul as a creative writer — the meeting disbanded.

In my office, a few minutes later, while snow fell outside the window, I sat down at the desk with my coat on and removed the paper from my briefcase. Mona Meyerling poked her head into my cubicle to ask if my car was stuck. I said no, and she went off, leaving me to read the essay a second time. When I had finished it I knew it was no better than a C, just as I had known it at the meeting.

As I moved off the steps of Cobb and onto the snow-covered walk, I saw a man, bareheaded and bundled up, sitting on a wooden bench some twenty feet along the path. I was feeling limp — as a result of feeling misguided once again — and I was anxious now to get home and change and be off to Martha Reganhart’s; then I saw that it was Paul Herz. I wondered if he had been watching me as I stood, thinking, on the steps of Cobb Hall. It made me feel vulnerable, as though just from seeing me there without my knowing, he could have divined the secrets of my life. I could not convince myself that he did not somehow know it was I who had called in the morning and hung up. Nor could I logically explain why I had not at least answered him after he had picked up the phone and said hello.

“How are you?” I asked, walking up to him. “Enjoying the night air? It’s a relief, isn’t it — after that?”

Paul removed one hand from his pocket and looked at his watch. “It’s a relief,” he said.

“Spigliano’s mission in life is to burn out the guts of better people than himself. Don’t take him to heart. I once overheard him say to someone on the phone, ‘Gabe is probably a nice fellow, but I wouldn’t say he has too many ideas.’ ” Snowflakes fell onto Paul’s thinning hair, and I had the urge — the kind of silly urge one can so easily give in to — to brush them loose. “You made perfect sense,” I said. “But he’s unbeatable. He doesn’t believe he can rise in the world unless everyone else falls.”