Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

But Ketterer and his daughter Monica, who as it were came with Lydia, in the same deal, were neither of them detached chroniclers or interpreters or enemies of their world. Rather, they were the embodiment of what my grandparents, and great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, had loathed and feared: shagitz thuggery, shiksa wiliness. They were to me like figures out of the folk legend of the Jewish past-only they were real, just like my sister’s Sicilians.

Of course I could not stand around too long being mesmerized by this fact. Something had to be done. In the beginning this consisted mostly of comforting Lydia in the aftermath of one of her tutorial disasters; then I tried to get her to leave Monica alone, to forget about saving her on Sundays and just try to make her as happy as she could for the few hours they had together. This was the same sort of commonsense advice that she received from Dr. Rutherford, but not even the two of us together, with the considerable influence we had over her, could prevent her from collapsing into frantic instruction before the day was out and bombarding Monica with a crash course in math, grammar, and the feminine graces before Ketterer arrived to spirit her back to his cave in the Chicago suburb of Home-wood.

What followed, followed. I became the child’s Sunday schoolteacher, unless I was down with a migraine. And she began to learn, or to try to. I taught her simple take-aways, I taught her simple sums, I taught her the names of the states bordering Illinois, I taught her to distinguish between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Washington and Lincoln, a period and a comma, a sentence and a paragraph, the little hand and the big hand. This last I accomplished by standing her on her feet and having her pretend hers were the arms of the clock. I taught her the poem I had composed when I was five and in bed with one of my fevers, my earliest literary achievement, according to my family: “Tick tock, Nathan is a clock.” “Tick tock,” she said, “Monica is a clock,” and thrust her arms into the nine fifteen position, so that her white church dress, getting tighter on her by the month, pulled across the little bubbles of her breasts. Ketterer came to hate me, Monica to fall in love with me, and Lydia to accept me at last as her means of salvation. She saw the way out of her life’s misery, and I, in the service of Perversity or Chivalry or Morality or Misogyny or Saintliness or Folly or Pent-up Rage or Psychic Illness or Sheer Lunacy or Innocence or Ignorance or Experience or Heroism or Judaism or Masochism or Self-Hatred or Defiance or Soap Opera or Romantic Opera or the Art of Fiction perhaps, or none of the above, or maybe all of the above and more-I found the way into mine. I would not have had it in me at that time to wander out after dinner at the Commons and spend a hundred dollars on the secondhand books that I wanted to fulfill my dream of a “library” as easily and simply as I squandered my manhood.

Peter Tarnopol was born in Yonkers, New York, thirty-four years ago. He was educated in public schools there, and was graduated summa cum laude from Brown University in 1954. He briefly attended graduate school, and then served for two years as an MP with the U.S. Army in Frankfurt, Germany, the setting for A Jewish Father, the first novel for which in 1960 he received the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Since then he has published only a handful of stories, devoting himself almost exclusively in the intervening years to his nightmarish marriage to the former Maureen Johnson of Elmira, New York. In her lifetime, Mrs. Tarnopol was a barmaid, an abstract painter, a sculptress, a waitress, an actress (and what an actress), a short-story writer, a liar, and a psychopath. Married in 1959, the Tarnopols were legally separated in 1962, at which time Mrs. Tarnopol accused the author, before Judge Milton Rosenzweig of the Supreme Court of the County of New York, of being “a well-known seducer of college girls.” (Mr. Tarnopol has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin and lately at Hofstra College on Long Island.) The marriage was dissolved in 1966 by Mrs. Tarnopol’s violent death. At the time of her demise she was unemployed and a patient in group therapy in Manhattan; she was receiving one hundred dollars a week in alimony.

From 1963 to 1966, Mr. Tarnopol conducted a love affair with Susan Seabury McCall, herself a young widow residing in Manhattan; upon the conclusion of the affair, Mrs. McCall attempted unsuccessfully to kill herself and is currently living unhappily in Princeton, New Jersey, with a mother she cannot abide, hike Mr. Tarnopol, Mrs. McCall has no children, but would very much like to before time runs out, sired preferably by Mr. Tarnopol. Mr. Tarnopol is frightened of remarrying, among other things.

From 1962 until 1967, Mr. Tarnopol was the patient of the psychoanalyst Dr. Otto Spielvogel of New York City, whose articles on creativity and neurosis have appeared in numerous journals, most notably the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies, of which he is a contributing editor. Mr. Tarnopol is considered by Dr. Spielvogel to be among the nation’s top young narcissists in the arts. Six months ago Mr. Tarnopol terminated his analysis with Dr. Spielvogel and went on leave from the university in order to take up temporary residence at the Quahsay Colony, a foundation-supported retreat for writers, painters, sculptors, and composers in rural Vermont. There Mr. Tarnopol keeps mostly to himself, devoting nights as well as days to considering what has become of his life. He is confused and incredulous much of the time, and on the subject of the late Mrs. Tarnopol, he continues to be a man possessed.

Presently Mr. Tarnopol is preparing to forsake the art of fiction for a while and embark upon an autobiographical narrative, an endeavor which he approaches warily, uncertain as to both its advisability and usefulness. Not only would the publication of such a personal document raise serious legal and ethical problems, but there is no reason to believe that by keep-ing his imagination at bay and rigorously adhering to the facts, Mr. Tarnopol will have exorcised his obsession once and for all. It remains to be seen whether his candor, such as it is, can serve any better than his art (or Dr. Spielvogel’s therapeutic devices) to demystify the fast and mitigate his admittedly un-commendable sense of defeat.

P. T.

Quahsay , Vt.

September 1967

Has anything changed?

I ask, recognizing that on the surface (which is not to be disparaged-I live there too) there is no comparing the thirty-four-year-old man able today to manage his misfortunes without collapse, to the twenty-nine-year-old boy who back in the summer of 1962 actually contemplated, however fleetingly, killing himself. On the June afternoon that I first stepped into Dr. Spielvogel’s office, I don’t think a minute elapsed before I had given up all pretense of being an “integrated” personality and begun to weep into my hands, grieving for the loss of my strength, my confidence, and my future. I was then (miraculously, I am no longer) married to a woman I loathed, but from whom I was unable to separate myself, subjugated not simply by her extremely professional brand of moral blackmail-by that mix of luridness and corn that made our life together resemble something serialized on afternoon TV or in the National Enquirer- but by my own childish availability to it. Just two months back I had learned of the ingenious strategy by which she had deceived me into marrying her three years earlier; instead of serving me as the weapon with which finally to beat my way out of our bedlam, what she had confessed (in the midst of her semiannual suicide attempt) seemed to have stripped me of my remaining defenses and illusions. My mortification was complete. Neither leaving nor staying meant anything to me any more.