Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

When I finished reading my twenty-five pages and asked for questions, there was to my surprise and disappointment, just one; as it was the only Negro in the class who had her hand raised, I wondered if it could be that after all I had said she was going to tell me she was offended by the tide of Conrad’s novel. I was already preparing an explanation that might turn her touchiness into a discussion of frankness in fiction-fiction as the secret and the taboo disclosed-when she rose to stand at respectful attention, a thin middle-aged woman in a neat dark suit and a pillbox hat: “Professor, I know that if you’re writing a friendly letter to a little boy, you write on the envelope ‘Master.’ But what if you’re writing a friendly letter to a little girl? Do you still say ‘Miss’-or just what do you say?”

The class, having endured nearly two hours of a kind of talk none of them had probably ever heard before outside of a church, took the occasion of her seemingly ludicrous question to laugh uproariously-she was the kid who had farted following the principal’s lecture on discipline and decorum. Their laughter was pointedly directed at student, not teacher; nonetheless, I flushed with shame and remained red all the while Mrs. Corbett, dogged and unperturbed in the face of the class’s amusement, pursued the knowledge she was there for.

Lydia Ketterer turned out to be by far the most gifted writer in the class and, though older than I, still the youngest of my students-not so young, however, as she looked in the bleak heart of a Chicago winter, dressed in galoshes, knee stockings, tartan skirt, “reindeer” sweater, and the tasseled red wool hat, from which a straight curtain of wheat-colored hair dropped down at either side of her face. Outfitted for the ice and cold, she seemed, amid all those tired night-school faces, a junior-high-school girl-in fact, she was twenty-nine and mother of a lanky ten-year-old already budding breasts more enticing than her own. She lived not far from me in Hyde Park, having moved to the university neighborhood four years earlier, following her breakdown -and in the hope of changing her luck. And indeed when we met in my classroom, she probably was living through what were to be the luckiest months of her life: she had a job she liked as an interviewer with a university-sponsored social science research project at two dollars an hour, she had a few older graduate students (connected to the project) as friends, she had a small bank account and a pleasant little apartment with a fireplace from which she could see across the Midway to the Gothic facades of the university. Also at that time she was the willing and grateful patient of a lay psychoanalyst, a woman named Rutherford, for whom she dressed up (in the most girlish dress-up clothes I’d seen since grade school, puffed sleeves, crinolines, etc.) and whom she visited every Saturday morning in her office on Hyde Park Boulevard. The stories she wrote were inspired mostly by the childhood recollections she delivered forth to Dr. Rutherford on these Saturdays and dealt almost exclusively with the period after her father had raped her and run, when she and her mother had been taken on as guests-her mother as guest, Lydia as Cinderella-by the two aunts in their maidenly little prison house in Skokie.

It was the accumulation of small details that gave Lydia’s stories such distinction as they had. With painstaking diligence she chronicled the habits and attitudes of her aunts, as though with each precise detail she was hurling a small stone back through her past at those pinch-faced little persecutors. From the fiction it appeared that the favorite subject in that household was, oddly enough, “the body.” “The body surely does not require that much milk on a bowl of puffed oats, my dear.” “The body will take only so much abuse, and then it will halk .” And so on. Unfortunately, small details, accurately observed and flatly rendered, did not much interest the rest of the class unless the detail was “symbolic” or sensational. Those who most hated Lydia’s stories were Agniashvily, an elderly Russian émigré who wrote original “Ribald Classics” (in Georgian, and translated into English for the class by his stepson, a restaurateur by trade) aimed at the Playboy “market”; Todd, a cop who could not go two hundred words into a narrative without a little something running in the gutter (blood, urine, “Sergeant Darling’s dinner”) and was a devotee (I was not-we clashed) of the O. Henry ending; the Negro woman, Mrs. Corbett, who was a file clerk with the Prudential during the day and at night wrote the most transparent and pathetic pipe dreams about a collie dog romping around a dairy farm in snow-covered Minnesota; Shaw, an “ex-newspaperman” with an adjectival addiction, who was always quoting to us something that “Max” Perkins had said to “Tom” Wolfe, seemingly in Shaw’s presence; and a fastidious male nurse named Wertz, who from his corner seat in the last row had with his teacher what is called “a love-hate” relationship. Lydia’s most ardent admirers, aside from myself, were two “ladies,” one who ran a religious bookshop in Highland Park and rather magnified the moral lessons to be drawn from Lydia’s fiction, and the other, Mrs. Slater, an angular, striking housewife from Flossmoor, who wore heather-colored suits to class and wrote “bittersweet” stories which concluded usually with two characters “inadvertently touching.” Mrs. Slater’s remarkable legs were generally directly under my nose, crossing and uncrossing, and making that whishing sound of nylon moving against nylon that I could hear even over the earnestness of my own voice. Her eyes were gray and eloquent: “I am forty years old, all I do is shop and pick up the children. I live for this class. I live for our conferences. Touch me, advertently or inadvertently. I won’t say no or tell my husband.”

In all there were eighteen of them and, with the exception of my religionist, not one who seemed to smoke less than a pack a night. They wrote on the backs of order forms and office stationery; they wrote in pencil and in multicolored inks; they forgot to number pages or to put them in order (less frequently, however, than I thought). Oftentimes the first sheet of a story would be stained with food spots, or several of the pages would be stuck together, in Mrs. Slater’s case with glue spilled by a child, in the case of Mr. Wertz, the male nurse, with what I took to be semen spilled by himself.

When the class got into a debate as to whether a story was “universal” in its implications or a character was “sympathetic,” there was often no way, short of gassing them, of getting them off the subject for the rest of the night. They judged the people in one another’s fiction not as though each was a collection of attributes (a mustache, a limp, a southern drawl) to which the author had arbitrarily assigned a Christian name, but as though they were discussing human souls about to be consigned to Hades or elevated to sainthood-depending upon which the class decided. It was the most vociferous among them who had the least taste or interest in the low-keyed or the familiar, and my admiration for Lydia’s stories would practically drive them crazy; invariably I raised somebody’s hackles, when I read aloud, as an example they might follow, something like Lydia’s simple description of the way in which her two aunts each had laid out on a doily in the bedroom her hairbrush, comb, hairpins, toothbrush, dish of Lifebuoy, and tin of dental powder. I would read a passage like this: “Aunt Helda, while listening to Father Coughlin reasoning with the twenty thousand Christians gathered in Briggs Stadium, would continually be clearing her throat, as though it were she who was to be called upon to speak next.” Such sentences were undoubtedly not so rich and supple as to deserve the sort of extensive, praiseful exegesis I would wind up giving them, but by comparison with most of the prose I read that semester, Mrs. Ketterer’s line describing Aunt Helda listening to the radio in the 1940s might have been lifted from Mansfield Park.