Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

Unless, of course, I was covering my tracks, “allowing” the headaches a somewhat longer lease on my life than might be physically desirable, for the sake of my moral well-being. For who could accuse me of falling ill as a means of cutting short my tour of army duty when it was clear that the rewarding academic life I had been so anxious to return to continued to be as marred by this affliction as my purposeless military existence had been? Each time I had emerged from another twenty-four-hour session of pain, I would think to myself, “How many more, before I’ve met my obligation?” I wondered if it was not perhaps the “plan” of these headaches to visit themselves upon me until such time as I would have been discharged from the service under ordinary conditions. Did I, as it were, owe the army a migraine for each month of service I had escaped, or was it for each week, or each day, or each hour? Even to believe that they might the out by the time I was fifty was hardly consolation to an ambitious twenty-four-year-old with as strong a distaste for the sickbed as I had developed in my childhood; also to one made buoyant by fulfilling the exacting demands of schedules and routines, the prospect of being dead to the world and to my work for twenty-four hours every ten days for the next thirty-six years, the thought of all that waste, was as distressing as the anticipation of the pain itself. Three times a month, for God only knew how long, I was to be sealed into a coffin (so I described it to myself, admittedly in the clutch of self-pity) and buried alive. Why?

I had already considered (and dismissed) the idea of taking myself to a psychoanalyst, even before the neurologist at Billings informed me that a study in psychosomatic medicine was about to be initiated at a North Shore clinic, under the direction of an eminent Freudian analyst. He thought it was more than likely that I might be taken on as a patient at a modest fee, especially as they were said to be interested particularly in the ailments that manifested themselves in “intellectuals” and “creative types.” The neurologist was not suggesting that migraines were necessarily symptomatic of a neurotic personality disturbance; rather he was responding, he said, to what he took to be “a Freudian orientation” in the questions I asked him and in the manner in which I had gone about presenting the history of the disorder.

I did not know that it was a Freudian orientation so much as a literary habit of mind which the neurologist was not accustomed to: that is to say, I could not resist reflecting upon my migraines in the same supramedical way that I might consider the illnesses of Milly Theale or Hans Castorp or the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, or ruminate upon the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach, or search out the “meaning” in Gogol’s short story of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev’s temporary loss of his nose. Whereas an ordinary man might complain, “I get these damn headaches” (and have been content to leave it at that), I tended, like a student of high literature or a savage who paints his body blue, to see the migraines as standing for something, as a disclosure or “epiphany,” isolated or accidental or inexplicable only to one who was blind to the design of a life or a book. What did my migraines signify?

The possibilities I came up with did not satisfy a student as “sophisticated” as myself; compared with The Magic Mountain or even “The Nose,” the texture of my own story was thin to the point of transparency. It was disappointing, for instance, to find myself associating the disability that had come over me when I had begun to wear a pistol on my hip with either my adolescent terror of the physical life or some traditional Jewish abhorrence of violence-such an explanation seemed too conventional and simplistic, too “easy.” A more attractive, if in the end no less obvious, idea had to do with a kind of psychological civil war that had broken out between the dreamy, needy, and helpless child I had been, and the independent, robust, manly adult I wanted to be. At the time I recalled it, Bartleby’s passive but defiant formula, “I would prefer not to,” had struck me as the voice of the man in me defying the child and his temptation to helplessness; but couldn’t it just as well be the voice of the frail and sickly little boy answering the call to perform the duties of a man? Or of a policeman? No, no, much too pat-my life surely must be more complex and subtle than that; The Wings of the Dove was. No, I could not imagine myself writing a story so tidy and facile in its psychology, let alone living one.

The stories I was writing-the fact of the writing itself-did not escape my scrutiny. It was to keep open the lines to my sanity and intelligence, to engage in a solitary, thoughtful activity at the end of those mindless days of directing traffic and checking passes at the gate into town, that I had taken up writing for three hours each evening at a table in the corner of the post library. After only a few nights, however, I had put aside my notes for the critical article I had planned on some novels of Virginia Woolf (for an issue of Modern Fiction Studies to be devoted entirely to her work) to begin what was to turn out to be my first published short story. Shortly thereafter, when the migraines began, and the search for a cause, a reason, a meaning, I thought I saw in the unexpected alteration the course of my writing had taken something analogous to that shift in my attention that used to disconcert my father when he presented the little boy in the sickbed with those neat arithmetical puzzles of his-the movement from intellectual or logical analysis to seemingly irrelevant speculation of an imaginary nature. And in the hospital, where in six weeks’ time I had written my second and third stories, I could not help wondering if for me illness was not a necessary catalyst to activate the imagination. I understood that this was not an original hypothesis, but if that made it more or less applicable to my situation I couldn’t tell; nor did I know what to do with the fact that the illness itself was the one that had regularly afflicted Virginia Woolf and to some degree contributed to the debilitation that led to suicide. I knew about Virginia Woolf’s migraines from having read her posthumous book, A Writer’s Diary, edited by her husband and published in my senior year of college. I even had the book with me in my footlocker, for the essay I had been going to write on her work. What was I to think then? No more than a coincidence? Or was I imitating the agony of this admirable writer, as in my stories I was imitating the techniques and simulating the sensibilities of still other writers I admired?

Following my examination by the neurologist, I decided to stop worrying about the “significance” of my condition and to try to consider myself, as the neurologist obviously did, to be one hundred and eighty pounds of living tissue subject to the pathology of the species, rather than a character in a novel whose disease the reader may be encouraged to diagnose by way of moral, psychological, or metaphysical hypotheses. As I was unable to endow my predicament with sufficient density or originality to satisfy my own literary tastes-unable to do “for” migraines what Mann had done in The Magic Mountain for TB or in Death in Venice for cholera-I had decided that the only sensible thing was to have my migraine and then forget about it till the next time. To look for meaning was fruitless as well as pretentious. Though I wondered: Couldn’t the migraines themselves be diagnosed as “pretentious” in origin?

I also withstood the temptation to take myself for an interview to the North Shore clinic where the study of psychosomatic ailments was getting under way. Not that I was out of sympathy with the theories or techniques of psychotherapy as I had grasped them through my reading. It was, rather, that aside from these headaches, I was as vigorous in the execution of my duties, and as thrilled with the circumstances of my life, as I could ever have dreamed of being. To be sure, to try to teach sixty-five freshmen to write an English sentence that was clear, logical, and precise was not always an enchanting experience; yet, even when teaching was most tedious, I maintained my missionary spirit and with it the conviction that with every clichéd expression or mindless argument I exposed in the margins of my students’ essays, I was waging a kind of guerrilla war against the army of slobs, philistines, and barbarians who seemed to me to control the national mind, either through the media or the government. The presidential press conference provided me with material for any number of classroom sessions; I would have samples of the Eisenhower porridge mimeographed for distribution and then leave him to the students to correct and grade. I would submit for their analysis a sermon by Norman Vincent Peale, the president’s religious adviser; or an ad for General Motors; or a “cover story” from Time. What with television quiz shows, advertising agencies, and the Cold War all flourishing, it was a period in which a composition teacher did not necessarily have to possess the credentials or doctrines of a clergyman to consider himself engaged in the business of saving souls.