Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

But I am too humiliated to do either. The country may have changed, I have not. I did not know such depths of humiliation were possible, even for me. A reader of Conrad’s Lord Jim and Mauriac’s Therese and Kafka’s “Letter to His Father,” of Hawthorne and Strindberg and Sophocles-of Freud!-and still I did not know that humiliation could do such a job on a man. It seems either that literature too strongly influences my ideas about life, or that I am able to make no connection at all between its wisdom and my existence. For I cannot fully believe in the hopelessness of my predicament, and yet the line that concludes The Trial is as familiar to me as my own face: “it was as if the shame of it must outlive him”! Only I am not a character in a book, certainly not that book. I am real. And my humiliation is equally real. God, how I thought I was suffering in adolescence when fly balls used to fall through my hands in the schoolyard, and the born athletes on my team would smack their foreheads in despair. What I would give now to be living again back in that state of disgrace. What I would give to be living back in Chicago, teaching the principles of composition to my lively freshmen all morning long, taking my simple dinner off a tray at the Commons at night, reading from the European masters in my bachelor bed before sleep, fifty monumental pages annotated and underlined, Mann, Tolstoy, Gogol, Proust, in bed with all that genius-oh to have that sense of worthiness again, and migraines too if need be! How I wanted a dignified life! And how confident I was!

To conclude, in a traditional narrative mode, the story of that Zuckerman in that Chicago. I leave it to those writers who live in the flamboyant American present, and whose extravagant fictions I sample from afar, to treat the implausible, the preposterous, and the bizarre in something other than a straightforward and recognizable manner.

In my presence Eugene Ketterer did his best to appear easygoing, unruffled, and nonviolent, just a regular guy. I called him Mr. Ketterer, he called me Nathan, Nate, and Natie. The later he was in delivering Monica to her mother, the more offhand and, to me, galling was his behavior; to Lydia it was infuriating, and in the face of it she revealed a weakness for vitriolic rage which I’d seen no evidence of before, not at home or in class or in her fiction. It did not help any to caution her against allowing him to provoke her; in fact, several times she accused me-afterward, tearfully asking forgiveness-of taking Ketterer’s side, when my only concern had been to prevent her from losing her head in front of Monica. She responded to Ketterer’s taunting like some animal in a cage being poked with a stick, and I knew, the second Sunday that I was on hand to witness his cruelty and her response, that I would shortly have to make it clear to “Gene” that I was not just some disinterested bystander, that enough of his sadism was enough.

In the beginning, before Ketterer and I finally had it out, if Lydia demanded an explanation from him for showing up at two P.M. (when he had been due to arrive with Monica at ten thirty in the morning) he would look at me and say, fraternally, “Women.” If Lydia were to reply, “That’s idiotic! That’s meaningless! What would a thug like you know about ‘women,’ or men, or children! Why are you late with her, Eugene?” he would just shrug and mumble, “Got held up.” “That will not do-!” “Have to, Lyd. ‘Fraid that’s the way the cookie crumbles.” Or without even bothering to give her an answer, he would say, again to me, “Live ‘n’ learn, Natie.” A similarly unpleasant scene would occur in the evening, when he arrived to pick Monica up either much too early or too late. “Look, I ain’t a clock. Never claimed to be.” “You never claimed to be anything -because you’re not anything!” “Yeah, I know, I’m a brute and a slob and a real bad thug, and you, you’re Lady Godiva. Yeah, I know all that.” “You’re a tormentor, that’s what you are! That you torture me is not even the point any more-but how can you be so cruel and heartless as to torture your own little child! How can you play with us like this, Sunday after Sunday, year after year-you caveman! you hollow ignoramus!” “Let’s go, Harmonica”- his nickname for the child-“time to go home with the Big Bad Wolf.”

Usually Monica spent the day at Lydia’s watching TV and wearing her hat. Ready to go at a moment’s notice.

“Monica,” Lydia would say, “you really can’t sit all day watching TV.”

Uncomprehending: “Uh-huh.”

“Monica, do you hear me? It’s three o’clock. Maybe that’s enough TV for one day-do you think? Didn’t you bring your homework?”

Completely in the dark: “My what?”

“Did you bring your homework this week, so we can go over it?”

A mutter: “Forgot.”

“But I told you I’d help you. You need help, you know that.”

Outrage: “Today’s Sunday.”

“And?”

Law of Nature: “Sundays I don’t do no homework.”

“Don’t talk like that, please. You never even spoke like that when you were a little six-year-old girl. You know better than that.”

Cantankerous: “What?”

“Using double negatives. Saying I don’t do no- the way your father does. And please don’t sit like that.”

Incredulous: “What?”

“You’re sitting like a boy. Change into your dungarees if you want to sit like that. Otherwise sit like a girl your age.”

Defiant: “I am.”

“Monica, listen to me: I think we should practice your subtraction. We’ll have to do it without the book, since you didn’t bring it”

Pleading: “But today’s Sunday.”

“But you need help in subtraction. That’s what you need, not church, but help with your math. Monica, take that hat off! Take that silly hat off this minute! It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and you just can’t wear it all day long!”

Determined. Wrathful: “It’s my hat-I can too!”

“But you’re in my house! And I’m your mother! And I’m telling you to take it off! Why do you insist on behaving in this silly way! I am your Mother, you know that! Monica, I love you and you love me-don’t you remember when you were a little girl, don’t you remember how we used to play? Take that hat off before I tear it off your head!”

Ultimate Weapon: “Touch my head and I’ll tell my dad on you!

“And don’t call him ‘Dad’! I cannot stand when you call that man who tortures the two of us ‘Dad’! And sit like a girl! Do as I tell you! Close your legs!”

Sinister: “They’re close.”

“They’re open and you’re showing your underpants and stop it! You’re too big for that-you go on buses, you go to school, if you’re wearing a dress then behave as though you’re wearing one! You cannot sit like this watching television Sunday after Sunday-not when you cannot even add two and two.”

Philosophical: “Who cares.”

“I care! Can you add two and two? I want to know! Look at me-I’m perfectly serious. I have to know what you know and what you don’t know, and where to begin. How much is two and two? Answer me.”

Dumpish: “Dunno.”

“You do know. And pronounce your syllables. And answer me!

Savage: “I don’t know! Leave me alone, you!”

“Monica, how much is eleven minus one? Eleven take away one. If you had eleven cents and someone took away one of them, how many would you have left? Dear, please, what number comes before eleven? You must know this.”

Hysterical: “1 don’t know it !”