Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

A word about my brother and sister, very different creatures from myself.

I am the youngest of three, always “the baby” in everyone’s eyes, right down to today. Joan, the middle child, is five years my senior and has lived most of her adult life in California with her husband Alvin, a land developer, and their four handsome children. Says Morris of our sister: “You would think she’d been born in a Boeing jet instead of over the store in the Bronx.” Alvin Rosen, my brother-in-law, is six foot two and intimidatingly handsome, particularly now that his thick curls have turned silvery (“My father thinks he dyes it that color,” Abner once told me in disgust) and his face has begun to crease like a cowboy’s; from all the evidence he seems pretty much at one with his life as Californian, yachtsman, skier, and real estate tycoon, and utterly content with his wife and his children. He and my trim stylish sister travel each year to places slightly off the main tourist route (or just on the brink of being “discovered”); only recently my parents received postcards from their granddaughter, Melissa Rosen, Joannie’s ten-year-old, postmarked Africa (a photo safari with the family) and Brazil (a small boat had carried friends and family on a week-long journey up the Amazon, a famous Stanford naturalist serving as their guide). They throw open their house for an annual benefit costume party each year in behalf of Bridges, the West Coast literary magazine whose masthead lists Joan as one of a dozen advisory editors-frequently they are called upon to bail the magazine out of financial trouble with a timely donation from the Joan and Alvin Rosen Foundation; they are also generous contributors to hospitals and libraries in the Bay Area and among the leading sponsors of an annual fund drive for California’s migrant workers (“Capitalists,” says Morris, “in search of a conscience. Aristocrats in overalls. Fragonard should paint ‘em.”); and they are good parents, if the buoyancy and beauty of their children are any indication. To dismiss them (as Morris tends to) as vapid and frivolous would be easier if their pursuit of comfort, luxury, beauty, and glamor (they number a politically active movie star among their intimates) weren’t conducted with such openness and zest, with a sense that they had discovered the reason for being. My sister, after all, was not always so fun loving and attractive or adept at enjoying life. In 1945, as valedictorian of Yonkers High, she was a hairy, hawk-nosed, undernourished-looking little “grind” whose braininess and sallow homeliness had made her just about the least popular girl in her class; the consensus then was that she would be lucky to find a husband, let alone the rich, lanky, Lincolnesque Wharton School graduate, Alvin Rosen, whom she carried away from the University of Pennsylvania along with her A.B. in English. But she did it-not without concentrated effort, to be sure. Electrolysis on the upper lip and along the jawbone, plastic surgery on the nose and chin, and the various powders and paints available at the drugstore have transformed her into a sleek, sensual type, still Semitic, but rather more the daughter of a shah than a shopkeeper. Driving around San Francisco in her Morgan, disguised as a rider off the pampas one day and a Bulgarian peasant the next, has gained her in her middle years something more than mere popularity-according to the society page of the San Francisco paper (also sent on to my mother by little Melissa) Joan is “the most daring and creative tastemaker” alive out there. The photograph of her, with Alvin in velvet on one bare arm and the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony on the other (captioned, by Melissa, “Mom at a party”), is simply staggering to one who remembers still that eight-by-ten glossy of the ‘45 senior prom crowd at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe in New York-there sits Joan, all nose and shoulder blades, adrift in a taffeta “strapless” into which it appears she will momentarily sink out of sight, her head of coarse dark hair (since straightened and shined so that she glows like Black Beauty) mockingly framed by the Amazonian gams of the chorus girl up on the stage behind her; as I remember it, sitting beside her, at their “ringside” table, was her date, the butcher’s large shy son, bemusedly looking down into a glass with a Tom Collins in it…And this woman today is the gregarious glamor girl of America’s most glamorous city. To me it is awesome: that she should be on such good terms with pleasure, such a success at satisfaction, should derive so much strength and confidence from how she looks, and where she travels, and what she eats and with whom…well, that is no small thing, or so it seems to her brother from the confines of his hermit’s cell.

Joan has recently written inviting me to leave Quahsay and come out to California to stay with her and her family for as long as I like. “We won’t even bother you with our goatish ways, if you should just want to sit around the pool polishing your halo. If it pleases you, we will do everything we can to prevent you from having even a fairly good time. But reliable sources in the East tell me that you are still very gifted at that yourself. My dearest Alyosha, between 1939, when I taught you to spell antidisestablishmentarianism,’ and now, you’ve changed. Or perhaps not-maybe what sent you into ecstasy over that word was how difficult it was. Truly, Pep, if your appetite for the disagreeable should ever slacken, I am here and so is the house. Your fallen sister, J.”

For the record, my reply:

Dear Joan: What’s disagreeable isn’t being where I am or living as I do right now. This is the best place for me, probably for some time to come. I can’t stay on indefinitely of course, but there are approximations to this sort of life. When Maureen and I lived in New Milford, and I had that twelve-by-twelve shack in the woods behind the house-and a bolt to throw on the door-I could be content for hours on end. I haven’t changed much since 1939: I still like more than anything to sit alone in a room spelling things out as best I can with a pencil and paper. When I first got to New York in ‘62, and my personal life was a shambles, I used to dream out loud in my analyst’s office about becoming again that confident and triumphant college ldd I was at twenty; now I find the idea of going back beyond that even more appealing. Up here I sometimes imagine that I am ten-and treat myself accordingly. To start the day I eat a bowl of hot cereal in the dining room as I did each morning in our kitchen at home; then I head out here to my cabin, at just about the time I used to go off to school. I’m at work by eight forty-five, when “the first bell” used to ring. Instead of arithmetic, social studies, etc., I write on the typewriter till noon. (Just like my boyhood idol, Ernie Pyle; actually I may have grown up to become the war correspondent I dreamed of being in 1943 -except that the front-line battles I report on aren’t the kind I’d had in mind.) Lunch out of a lunch pail provided by the dining hall here: a sandwich, some carrot sticks, an oatmeal cookie, an apple, a thermos of milk. More than enough for this growing boy. After lunch I resume writing until three thirty, when “the last bell” used to ring at school. I straighten up my desk and carry my empty lunch pail back to the dining hall, where the evening’s soup is cooling. The smell of dill, mother’s perfume. Manchester is three miles from the Colony by way of a country road that curves down through the hills. There is a women’s junior college at the edge of town, and the girls are down there by the time I arrive. I see them inside the laundromat and at the post office and buying shampoo in the pharmacy-reminding me of the playground “after school,” aswarm with long-haired little girls a ten-year-old boy could only admire from afar and with wonder. I admire them from afar and with wonder in the local luncheonette, where I go for a cup of coffee. I have been asked by one of the English professors at the college to speak to his writing class. I declined. I don’t want them any more accessible than they would be if I were back in the fifth grade. After my coffee I walk down the street to the town library and sit for a while leafing through the magazines and watching the schoolkids at the long tables copying their book reports off the jacket flaps. Then I go out and hitch a ride back up to the Colony; I couldn’t feel any more trusting and innocent than when I hop out of the car and say to the driver, “Thanks for the ride-s’long!”