Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

I met the woman with whom I was to ruin my life only a few months after arriving back in Chicago in the fall of 1956, following a premature discharge from the army. I was just short of twenty-four, held a master’s degree in literature, and prior to my induction into the service had been invited to return to the College after my discharge as an instructor in the English composition program. Under any circumstances my parents would have been thrilled by what they took to be the eminence of that position; as it was, they looked upon this “honor” as something like divine compensation for the fate that had befallen their daughter. Their letters were addressed, without irony, to “Professor Nathan Zuckerman”; I’m sure many of them, containing no more than a line or two about the weather in New Jersey, were mailed solely for the sake of addressing them.

I was pleased myself, though not so awestruck. In fact, the example of my own tireless and resolute parents had so instilled in me the habits that make for success that I had hardly any understanding at all of failure. Why did people fail? In college, 1 had looked with awe upon those fellows who came to class un prepared for examinations and who did not submit their assignments on time. Now why should they want to do it that way, I wondered. Why would anyone prefer the ignobility of defeat to the genuine pleasures of achievement? Especially as the latter was so easy to effectuate: all you had to be was attentive, methodical, thorough, punctual, and persevering; all you had to be was orderly, patient, self-disciplined, undiscourageable, and industrious-and, of course, intelligent. And that was it. What could be simpler?

What confidence I had in those days! What willpower and energy! And what a devourer of schedules and routines! I rose every weekday at six forty-five to don an old knit swimsuit and do thirty minutes of pushups, sit-ups, deep knee bends, and half a dozen other exercises illustrated in a physical-fitness guide that I had owned since adolescence and which still served its purpose; of World War Two vintage, it was tided How To Be Tough as a Marine. By eight I would have bicycled the mile to my office overlooking the Midway. There I would make a quick review of the day’s lesson in the composition syllabus, which was divided into sections, each illustrating one of a variety of rhetorical techniques; the selections were brief-the better to scrutinize meticulously-and drawn mostly from the work of Olympians: Aristotle, Hobbes, Mill, Gibbon, Pater, Shaw, Swift, Sir Thomas Browne, etc. My three classes of freshman composition each met for one hour, five days a week. I began at eight thirty and finished at eleven thirty, three consecutive hours of hearing more or less the same student discussion and offering more or less the same observations myself-and yet never with any real flagging of enthusiasm. Much of my pleasure, in fact, derived from trying to make each hour appear to be the first of the day. Also there was a young man’s satisfaction in authority, especially as that authority did not require that I wear any badge other than my intelligence, my industriousness, a tie, and a jacket. Then of course I enjoyed, as I previously had as a student, the courtesy and good-humored seriousness of the pedagogical exchange, nearly as much as I enjoyed the sound of the word “pedagogical.” It was not uncommon at the university for faculty and students eventually to call one another by their given names, at least outside the classroom. I myself never considered this a possibility, however, any more than my father could have imagined being familiar in their offices with the businessmen who had hired him to keep their books; like him, I preferred to be thought somewhat stiff, rather than introduce considerations extraneous to the job to be done, and which might tempt either party to the transaction to hold himself less accountable than was “proper.” Especially for one so close to his students in age, there was a danger in trying to appear to be “a good guy” or “one of the boys”-as of course there was equally the danger of assuming an attitude of superiority that was not only in excess of my credentials, but distasteful in itself.

That I should have to be alert to every fine point of conduct may seem to suggest that I was unnatural in my role, when actually it was an expression of the enthusiasm with which I took to my new vocation and of the passion I had in those days to judge myself by the strictest standard in every detail.

By noon I would have returned to my small quiet apartment, eaten a sandwich I had prepared for myself, and already have begun work on my own fiction. Three short stories I had written during the evenings when I was in the army had all been accepted for publication in a venerable literary quarterly; they were, however, no more than skillful impersonations of the sort of stories I had been taught to admire most in college-stories of “The Garden Party” variety-and their publication aroused in me more curiosity than pride. I owed it to myself, I thought, to find out if I might have a talent that was my own. “To owe it to oneself,” by the way, was a notion entirely characteristic of a man like my father, whose influence upon my thinking was more pervasive than might have been apparent to anyone-myself included-who had listened to me, in the classroom, discussing the development of a theory in Aristotle or a metaphor in Sir Thomas Browne.

At six P.M., following five hours of working at my fiction and an hour brushing up on my French-I planned to travel to Europe during the summer vacation-I bicycled back to the university to eat dinner in the Commons, where I had formerly taken my meals as a graduate student. The dark wood tones of the paneled hall, and the portraits of the university’s distinguished dead hanging above the refectory tables, satisfied a strong taste in me for institutional dignity. In such an environment I felt perfectly content to eat alone; indeed, I would not have considered myself unblessed to have been told that I would be dining off a tray in this hall, eating these stews and Salisbury steaks, for the rest of my days. Before returning to my apartment to mark one seventh of my weekly stack of sixty-odd freshman essays (as many as I could take in a sitting) and to prepare the next day’s lesson, I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores in the neighborhood. Owning my own “library” was my only materialistic ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousands of books to buy that week, I would frequently get so excited that by the time the purchase was accomplished I had to make use of the bookseller’s toilet facilities. I don’t believe that either microbe or laxative has ever affected me so strongly as the discovery that I was all at once the owner of a slightly soiled copy of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity in the original English edition.

At ten o’clock, having completed my classroom preparation, I would go off to a local graduate-student hangout, where generally I ran into somebody I knew and had a glass of beer-one beer, one game of pinball soccer, and then home, for before I went to sleep, there were still fifty pages to be underlined and annotated in some major work of European literature that either I hadn’t yet read or had misread the first time around. I called this “filling in the gaps.” Reading-and noting-fifty pages a night, I could average three books a month, or thirty-six a year. I also knew approximately how many short stories I might expect to complete in a year, if I put in thirty hours at it a week; and approximately how many students’ essays I could mark in an hour; and how large my “library” would be in a decade, if I were to continue to be able to make purchases in accordance with my present budget. And I liked knowing all these things, and to this day like myself for having known them.