Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

If the classroom caused me to imagine myself to be something of a priest, the university neighborhood seemed to me something like my parish-and of course something of a Bloomsbury-a community of the faithful, observing the sacraments of literacy, benevolence, good taste, and social concern. My own street of low, soot-stained brick apartment buildings was on the grim side, and the next one over, run-down only the year before, was already in rubble-leveled as though by blockbusters for an urban renewal project; also, in the year I had been away, there had been a marked increase of random nighttime violence in the neighborhood. Nonetheless, within an hour of my return, I felt as comfortable and at home as someone whose family had dwelled in the same small town for generations. Simultaneously I could never forget that it was not in such a paradise of true believers that I had been born and raised; and even if I should live in the Hyde Park neighborhood for the next fifty years-and why should I ever want to live elsewhere?-the city itself, with streets named for the prairie and the Wabash, with railroad trains marked “Illinois Central” and a lake bearing the name “Michigan,” would always have the flavor of the faraway for one whose fantasies of adventure had been nurtured in a sickbed in Camden, New Jersey, over an aeon of lonely afternoons. How could I be in “Chicago”? The question, coming at me while shopping in the Loop, or watching a movie at the Hyde Park Theatre, or simply opening a can of sardines for lunch at my apartment on Drexel, seemed to me unanswerable. I suppose my wonderment and my joy were akin to my parents’, when they would address those envelopes to me in care of Faculty Exchange. How could he be a professor, who could barely breathe with that bronchitis? All this by way of explaining why I did not betake myself to that clinic for the study of psychosomatic ailments and offer up my carcass and unconscious for investigation. I was too happy. Everything that was a part of getting older seemed to me to be a pleasure: the independence and authority, of course, but no less so the refinement and strengthening of one’s moral nature-to be magnanimous where one had been selfish and carping, to be forgiving where one had been resentful, to be patient where one had been impetuous, to be generous and helpful where one had previously been needful…It seemed to me at twenty-four as natural to be solicitous of my sixty-year-old parents as to be decisive and in command with my eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students. Toward the young girls in my classes, some as lovely and tempting as the junior at Pembroke College with whom I had just concluded a love affair, I behaved as I was expected to; it went without saying that as their teacher I must not allow myself to take a sexual interest in them or to exploit my authority for personal gratification. No difficulty I encountered seemed beyond my powers, whether it was concluding a love affair, or teaching the principles of logic to my dullest composition students, or rising with a dry mouth to address the Senate of the Faculty, or writing a short story four times over to get it “right”…How could I turn myself over to a psychoanalyst as “a case”? All the evidence of my life (exclusive of the migraines) argued too strongly against that, certainly to one to whom it meant so much never to be classified as a patient again. Furthermore, in the immediate aftermath of a headache, I would experience such elation just from the absence of pain that I would almost believe that whatever had laid that dose of suffering upon me had been driven from my body for good-that the powerful enemy (yes, more feeble interpretation, or superstition) who had unleashed upon me all his violence, who had dragged me to the very end of my endurance, had been proved unable in the end to do me in. The worse the headache the more certain I was when it was over that I had defeated the affliction once and for all. And was a better man for it. (And no, my body was not painted blue in these years, nor did I otherwise believe in angels, demons, or deities.) Often I vomited during the attacks, and afterward, not quite daring to move (for fear of breaking), I lay on the bathroom floor with my chin on the toilet bowl and a hand mirror to my face, in a parody perhaps of Narcissus. I wanted to see what I looked like having suffered so and survived; in that feeble and euphoric state, it would not have frightened me-might even have thrilled me-to have observed black vapors, something like cannon smoke, rolling out of my ears and nostrils. I would talk to my eyes, reassuring them as though they were somebody else’s: “That’s it, the end, no more pain.” But in point of fact there would be plenty more; the experiment which has not ended was only beginning.

In the second semester of that-no other word will do; if it smacks of soap opera, that is not unintentional-of that fateful year, I was asked if I should like to teach, in addition to my regular program, the night course in “Creative Writing” in the downtown division of the university, a single session each Monday night running for three consecutive hours, at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars for the semester. Another windfall it seemed to me-my round-trip tourist-class fare on the Rotterdam. As for the students, they were barely versed in the rules of syntax and spelling, and so, I discovered, hardly able to make head or tail of the heady introductory lecture that, with characteristic thoroughness, I had prepared over a period of a week for delivery at our first meeting. Entitled “The Strategies and Intentions of Fiction,” it was replete with lengthy (and I had thought) “salient” quotations from Aristotle’s Poetics, Flaubert’s correspondence, Dostoevsky’s diaries, and James’s critical prefaces-I quoted only from masters, pointed only to monuments: Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Ambassadors, Madame Bovary, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Sound and the Fury. “ ‘What seems to me the highest and most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does- that is, fill us with wonderment. The most beautiful works have indeed this quality. They are serene in aspect, incomprehensible… pitiless.’” Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Colet (“1853,” I told them, in responsible scholarly fashion, “a year into the writing of Madame Bovary ”) . “‘The house of fiction has in short not one window but a million…every one of which is pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will…’ ” James, the preface to The Portrait of a Lady. I concluded with a lengthy reading from Conrad’s inspirational introduction to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897): “ ‘…the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities-like the vulnerable body within a steel armor. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring-and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition- and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation-to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity-the dead to the living and the living to the unborn…’”