Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

I sleep in a room on the second floor of the big three-story farmhouse that houses the guests; on the main floor are the kitchen, dining hall, and the living room (magazines, record player, and piano); there’s a ping-pong table on a side porch, and that’s just about it. On the floor of my room, in my undershorts, I do half an hour of calisthenics at the end of each afternoon. In the last six months, through dint of exercise and very little appetite, I have become just about as skinny as I was when you used to pretend to play the xylophone on my ribs. After “gym” I shave and shower. My windows are brushed by the needles of an enormous spruce; that’s the only sound I hear while shaving, outside of the water running into the sink. Not a noise I can’t account for. I try each evening to give myself a “perfect” shave, as a shaving ten-year-old might. I concentrate: hot water, soap, hot water, coat of Rise, with the grain, coat of Rise, against the grain, hot water, cold water, thorough investigation of all surfaces…perfect. The vodka martini that I mix for myself at six, I sip alone while listening to the news on my portable radio. (I am on my bed in my bathrobe: face ivory smooth, underarms deodorized, feet powdered, hair combed-clean as a bridegroom in a marriage manual.) The martini was of course not my habit at ten, but something like Dad’s when he came home with his headache (and the day’s receipts) from the store: looking as though he were drinking turpentine, he would toss down his shot of Schenley’s, and then listen in “his” chair to “Lyle Van and the News.” Dinner is eaten at six thirty here, in the company of the fifteen or so guests in residence at the moment, mostly novelists and poets, a few painters, one composer. Conversation is pleasant, or annoying, or dull; in all, no more or less taxing than eating night after night with one’s family, though the family that comes to mind isn’t ours so much as the one Chekhov assembled in Uncle Vanya. A young poetess recently arrived here mired in astrology; whenever she gets going on somebody’s horoscope I want to jump up from the table and get a pistol and blow her brains out. But as we are none of us bound by blood, law, or desire (as far as I can tell), forbearance generally holds sway. We drift after dinner into the living room, to chat and scratch the resident dog; the composer plays Chopin nocturnes; the Neiv York Times passes from hand to hand…generally within the hour we have all drifted off without a word. My understanding is that with only five exceptions, all those in residence right now happen to be in flight, or in hiding, or in recovery-from bad marriages, divorces, and affairs. I have overheard tag ends of conversation issuing from the phone booth down in the kitchen to support this rumor. Two teacher-poets in their thirties who have just been through the process of divesting themselves of wives and children and worldly goods (in exchange for student admirers) have struck up a friendship and compare poems they’re writing about the ordeal of giving up little sons and daughters. On the weekends when their dazzling student girl friends come to visit, they disappear into the bedsheets at the local motel for forty-eight hours at a clip. I recently began to play ping-pong again for the first time in twenty years, two or three fierce games after dinner with an Idaho woman, a stocky painter in her fifties who has been married five times; one night last week (only ten days after her arrival) she drank everything she could find on the premises, including the vanilla extract in the cook’s pantry, and had to be taken away the next morning in a station wagon by the mortician who runs the local AA. We all left our typewriters to stand glumly out on the steps and wave goodbye. “Ah, don’t worry,” she called to us out the car window, “if it wasn’t for my mistakes I’d still be back on the front porch in Boise.” She was our only “character” and far and away the most robust and spirited of the survivors hereabouts. One night six of us went down into Manchester for a beer and she told us about her first two marriages. After she finished, the astrologist wanted to know her sign: the rest of us were trying to figure out how come she wasn’t dead. “Why the hell do you keep getting married, Mary?” I asked her. She chucked me on the chin and said, “Because I don’t want to the shriveled up.” But she’s gone now (probably to marry the mortician), and except for the muffled cries rising from the phone booth at night, it’s as quiet here as a hospital zone. Perfect for homework. After dinner and the Times, I walk back out to my studio, one of twenty cabins scattered along a dirt road that winds through the two hundred acres of open fields and evergreen woods. In the cabin there’s a writing desk, a cot, a Franklin stove, a couple of straight-backed chairs painted yellow, a bookcase painted white, and the wobbly wicker table where I eat lunch at noon. I read over what I’ve written that day. Trying to read anything else is useless; my mind wanders back to my own pages. I think about that or nothing.

Walking back to the main house at midnight I have only a flashlight to help me make my way along the path that runs between the trees. Under a black sky by myself, I am no more courageous at thirty-four than I was as a boy: there is the urge to run. But as a matter of fact invariably I will turn the flashlight off and stand out there in the midnight woods, until either fear subsides or I have achieved something like a Mexican standoff between me and it. What frightens me? At ten it was only oblivion. I used to pass the “haunted” Victorian houses on Hawthorne Avenue on my way home from Cub Scout meetings, reminding myself, There are no ghosts, the dead are dead, which was, of course, the most terrifying thought of all. Today it’s the thought that the dead aren’t that turns my knees to water. I think: the funeral was another trick-she’s alive! Somehow or other, she will reappear! Down in town in the late afternoon, I half expect to look into the laundromat and see her stuffing a machine with a bag of wash. At the luncheonette where I go for my cup of coffee, I sometimes sit at the counter waiting for Maureen to come charging through the door, with finger pointed-“What are you doing in here! You said you’d meet me by the bank at four!” “By the bank? Four? You?” And we’re at it. ‘You’re dead,” I tell her, “you cannot meet anyone by any bank if you are, as you are, dead!” But still, you will have observed, I keep my distance from the pretty young students buying shampoo to wash their long hair. Who ever accused a shy ten-year-old of being “a well-known seducer of college girls”? Or, for that matter, heard of a plaintiff who was ashes? “She’s dead,” I remind myself, “and it is over.” But how can that be? Defies credulity. If in a work of realistic fiction the hero was saved by something as fortuitous as the sudden death of his worst enemy, what intelligent reader would suspend his disbelief? Facile, he would grumble, and fantastic. Fictional wish fulfillment, fiction in the service of one’s dreams. Not True to Life. And I would agree. Maureen’s death is not True to Life. Such things simply do not happen, except when they do. (And as time passes and I get older, I find that they do with increasing frequency.)

I’m sending along Xerox copies of two stories I’ve written up here, both more or less on the Subject. They’ll give you an idea as to why I’m here and what I’m doing. So far no one has read the stories but my editor. He had encouraging things to say about both of them, but of course what he would like to see is that novel for which my publisher advanced twenty thousand dollars back when I was a boy wonder. I know how much he would like to see it because he so scrupulously and kindly avoided mentioning it. He gave the game away, however, by inquiring whether “Courting Disaster” (one of the two stories enclosed) was going “to develop into a longer work about a guilt-ridden Zuckerman and his beautiful stepdaughter in Italy-a kind of post-Freudian meditation on themes out of Anna Karenina and Death in Venice. Is that what you’re up to, or are you planning to continue to write Zuckerman variations until you have constructed a kind of full-length fictional fugue?” Good ideas all right, but what I am doing, I had to tell the man standing there holding my IOU, is more like trying to punch my way out of a paper bag. “Courting Disaster” is a post-cataclysmic fictional meditation on nothing more than my marriage: what if Maureen’s personal mythology had been biographical truth? Suppose that, and suppose a good deal more-and you get “CD.” From a Spielvogelian perspective, it may even be read as a legend composed at the behest and under the influence of the superego, my adventures as seen through its eyes-as “Salad Days” is something like a comic idyll honoring a Pannish (and as yet unpunished) id. It remains for the ego to come forward then and present its defense, for all parties to the conspiracy-to-abscond-with-my-life to have had their day in court. I realize now, as I entertain this idea, that the nonaction narrative that I’m currently working on might be considered just that: the “I” owning up to its role as ringleader of the plot. If so, then after all testimony has been heard and a guilty verdict swiftly rendered, the conspirators will be consigned to the appropriate correctional institution. You suggest your pool. Warden Spielvogel, my former analyst (whose job, you see, I am now doing on the side), would suggest that the band of desperados be handed back over to him for treatment in the cell block at Eighty-ninth and Park. The injured plaintiff in this action does not really care where it happens, or how, so long as the convicted learn their lesson and NEVER DO IT AGAIN. Which isn’t likely: we are dealing with a treacherous bunch here, and that this trio has been entrusted with my well-being is a source of continuous and grave concern. Having been around the track with them once already, I would as soon consign my fate to the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges; buffoons, but they at least like one another. P.S. Don’t take personally the brother of “Salad Days” or the sister of “Courting Disaster.” Imaginary siblings serving the design of the fiction. If I ever felt superior to you and your way of life, I don’t any longer. Besides, it’s to you that I may owe my literary career. Trying on a recent afternoon walk to figure out how I got into this line of work, I remembered myself at age six and you at age eleven, waiting in the back seat of the car for Mother and Dad to finish their Saturday night shopping. You kept using a word that struck me as the funniest thing I’d ever heard, and once you saw how much it tickled me, you wouldn’t stop, though I begged you to from the floor of the car where I was curled up in a knot from pure hilarity. I believe the word was “noodle,” used as a synonym for “head.” You were merciless, somehow you managed to stick it somewhere into every sentence you uttered, and eventually I wet my pants. When Mother and Dad returned to the car I was outraged with you and in tears. “Joannie did it,” I cried, whereupon Dad informed me that it was a human impossibility for one person to pee in another person’s pants. Little he knew about the power of art.