Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

I wanted to hang a sign over my desk saying ANYONE IN THIS CLASS CAUGHT USING HIS IMAGINATION WILL BE SHOT. I would put it more gently when, in the parental sense, I lectured them. “You just cannot deliver up fantasies and call that ‘fiction.’ Ground your stories in what you know. Stick to that. Otherwise you tend, some of you, toward the pipe dream and the nightmare, toward the grandiose and the romantic-and that’s no good. Try to be precise, accurate, measured…” “Yeah? What about Tom Wolfe,” asked the lyrical ex-newspaperman Shaw, “would you call that measured, Zuckerman?” (No Mister or Professor from him to a kid half his age.) “What about prose-poetry, you against that too?” Or Agniashvily, in his barrel-deep Russian brogue, would berate me with Spillane-“And so how come he’s gotten million in print, Professor?” Or Mrs. Slater would ask, in conference, in-advertently touching my sleeve, “But you wear a tweed jacket, Mr. Zuckerman. Why is it ‘dreamy’-I don’t understand-if Craig in my story wears-“ I couldn’t listen. “And the pipe, Mrs. Slater: now why do you think you have him continually puffing on that pipe?” “But men smoke pipes.” “Dreamy, Mrs. Slater, too damn dreamy.” “But-“ “Look, write a story about shopping at Carson’s, Mrs. Slater! Write about your afternoon at Saks!” “Yes?” “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Oh, yes, when it came to grandiosity and dreaminess, to all manifestations of self-inflating romance, I had no reservations about giving them a taste of the Zuckerman lash. Those were the only times I lost my temper, and of course losing it was always calculated and deliberate: scrupulous.

Pent-up rage, by the way-that was the meaning the army psychiatrist had assigned to my migraines. He had asked whether I liked my father better than my mother, how I felt about heights and crowds, and what I planned to do when I was returned to civilian life, and concluded from my answers that I was a vessel of pent-up rage. Another poet, this one in uniform, bearing the rank of captain.

My friends (my only real enemy is dead now, though my censurers are plentiful)-my friends, I earned those two hundred and fifty dollars teaching “Creative Writing” in a night school, every penny of it. For whatever it may or may not “mean,” I didn’t once that semester get a migraine on a Monday, not that I wasn’t tempted to take a crack at it when a tough-guy story by Patrolman Todd or a bittersweet one by Mrs. Slater was on the block for the evening…No, to be frank, I counted it a blessing of sorts when the headaches happened to fall on the weekend, on my time off. My superiors in the college and downtown were sympathetic and assured me that I wasn’t about to lose my job because I had to be out ill “from time to time,” and up to a point I believed them; still, to be disabled on a Saturday or a Sunday was to me far less spiritually debilitating than to have to ask the indulgence of either my colleagues or students.

Whatever erotic curiosity had been aroused in me by Lydia’s pretty, girlish, Scandinavian block of a head-and odd as it will sound to some, by the exoticism of the blighted middle western Protestant background she wrote about and had managed to survive in one piece-was decidedly outweighed by my conviction that I would be betraying my vocation, and doing damage to my self-esteem, if I were to take one of my students to bed. As I have said, suppressing feelings and desires extraneous to the purpose that had brought us together seemed to me crucial to the success of the transaction-as I must have called it then, the pedagogical transaction-allowing each of us to be as teacherly or as studently as was within his power, without wasting time and spirit being provocative, charming, duplicitous, touchy, jealous, scheming, etc. You could do all that out in the street; only in the classroom, as far as I knew, was it possible to approach one another with the intensity ordinarily associated with love, yet cleansed of emotional extremism and tree of base motives having to do with profit and power. To be sure, on more than a few occasions, my night class was as perplexing as a Kafka courtroom, and my composition classes as wearisome as any assembly line, but that our effort was characterized at bottom by modesty and mutual trust, and conducted as ingenuously as dignity would permit, was indisputable. Whether it was Mrs. Corbett’s innocent and ardent question about how to address a friendly letter to a little girl or my own no less innocent and ardent introductory lecture to which she was responding, what we said to one another was not uttered in the name of anything vile or even mundane. At twenty-four, dressed up like a man in a clean white shirt and a tie, and bearing chalk powder on the tails of my worn tweed jacket, that seemed to me a truth to be held self-evident. Oh, how I wanted a soul that was pure and spotless!

In Lydia’s case, professorial discretion was helped along some, or I should have thought it would be, by that rolling, mannish gait of hers. Tire first time she entered my class I actually wondered if she could be some kind of gymnast or acrobat, perhaps a member of a women’s track and field association; I was reminded of those photographs in the popular magazines of the strong blue-eyed women athletes who win medals at the Olympic games for the Soviet Union. Yet her shoulders were as touchingly narrow as a child’s, and her skin pale and almost luminously soft. Only from the waist to the floor did she seem to be moving on the body of my sex rather than her own.

Within the month I had seduced her, as much against her inclination and principles as my own. It was standard enough procedure, pretty much what Mrs. Slater must have had in mind: a conference alone together in my office, a train ride side by side on the IC back to Hyde Park, an invitation to a beer at my local tavern, the flirtatious walk to her apartment, the request by me for coffee, if she would make me some. She begged me to think twice about what I was doing, even after she had returned from the bathroom where she had inserted her diaphragm and I had removed her underpants for the second time and was hunched, unclothed, over her small, ill-proportioned body, preparatory to entering her. She was distressed, she was amused, she was frightened, she was mystified.

“There are so many beautiful young girls around, why pick on me? Why choose me, when you could have the cream of the crop?

I didn’t bother to answer. As though she were the one being coy or foolish, I smiled.

She said: “Look, look at me.”

“I’m doing that.”

“Are you? I’m five years older than you. My breasts sag, not that they ever amounted to much to begin with. Look, I have stretch marks. My behind’s too big, I’m hamstrung-’Professor,’ listen to me, I don’t have orgasms. I want you to know that beforehand. I never have.”

When we later sat down for the coffee, Lydia, wrapped in a robe, said this: “I’ll never know why you wanted to do that. Why not Mrs. Slater, who’s begging you for it? Why should anyone like you want me?”

Of course I didn’t “want” her, not then or ever. We lived together for almost six years, the first eighteen months as lovers, and the four years following, until her suicide, as husband and wife, and in all that time her flesh was never any less distasteful to me than she had insistently advertised it to be. Utterly without lust, I seduced her on that first night, the next morning, and hundreds of times thereafter. As for Mrs. Slater, I seduced her probably no more than ten times in all, and never anywhere but in my imagination.

It was another month before I met Monica, Lydia’s ten-year-old daughter, so it will not do to say that, like Nabokov’s designing rogue, I endured the uninviting mother in order to have access to the seductive and seducible young daughter. That came later. In the beginning Monica was without any attraction whatsoever, repellent to me in character as well as appearance: lanky, stringy-haired, undernourished, doltish, without a trace of curiosity or charm, and so illiterate that at ten she was still unable to tell the time. In her dungarees and faded polo shirts she had the look of some mountain child, the offspring of poverty and deprivation. Worse, when she was dressed to kill in her white dress and round white hat, wearing her little Mary Jane shoes and carrying a white handbag and a Bible (white too), she seemed to me a replica of those over-dressed little Gentile children who used to pass our house every Sunday on their way to church, and toward whom I used to feel an emotion almost as strong as my own grandparents’ aversion. Secretly, and despite myself, I came close to despising the stupid and stubborn child when she would appear in that little white churchgoing outfit- and so too did Lydia, who was reminded by Monica’s costume of the clothes in which she had had to array herself each Sunday in Skokie, before being led off to Lutheran services with her aunts Helda and Jessie. (As the story had it: “It did a growing body good to sit once a week in a nice starched dress, and without squirming.”)