Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

Joan’s prompt reply:

Thanks for the long letter and the two new stories, three artful documents springing from the same hole in your head. When that one drilled she really struck pay dirt. Is there no bottom to your guilty conscience? Is there no other source available for your art? A few observations on literature and life-i. You have no reason to hide in the woods like a fugitive from justice. 2. You did not kill her, in any way, shape, or form. Unless there is something I don’t know. 3. To have asked a pretty girl to have intercourse with a zucchini in your presence is morally inconsequential. Everybody has his whims. You probably made her day (if that was you). You announce it in your “Salad Days” story with all the bravado of a naughty boy who knows he has done wrong and now awaits with bated breath his punishment. Wrong, Peppy, is an ice pick, not a garden vegetable; wrong is by force or with children. 4. You do disapprove of me, as compared with Morris certainly; but that, as they say, is your problem, baby. (And brother Moe’s. And whoever else’s. Illustrative anecdote: About six weeks ago, immediately after the Sunday supplement here ran a photo story on our new ski house at Squaw Valley, I got a midnight phone call from a mysterious admirer. A lady. “Joan Rosen?” “Yes.” “I’m going to expose you to the world for what you are.” “Yes? What is that?” “A Jewish girl from the Bronx! Why do you try to hide it, Joan? It’s written all over you, you phony bitch!”) So then, I don’t take either of those make-believe siblings for myself. I know you can’t write about me-you can’t make pleasure credible. And a working marriage that works is about as congenial to your talent and interests as the subject of outer space. You know I admire your work (and I do like these two stories, when I can ignore what they imply about your state of mind), but the fact is that you couldn’t create a Kitty and a Levin if your life depended on it. Your imagination (hand in hand with your life) moves in the other direction. 5. Reservation (“Courting Disaster”): I never heard of anyone killing herself with a can opener. Awfully gruesome and oddly arbitrary, unless I am missing something. 6. Idle curiosity: was Maureen seduced by her father? She never struck me as broken in that way. 7. After the “nonfiction narrative” on the Subject, what next? A saga in heroic couplets? Suggestion: Why don’t you plug up the well and drill for inspiration elsewhere? Do yourself a favor (if those words mean anything to you) and FORGET IT. Move on! Come West, young man! P.S. Two enclosures are for your edification (and taken together, right up your fictional alley-if you want to see unhappiness, you ought to see this marriage in action). Enclosed note #1 is to me from Lane Coutell, Bridges’ new, twenty-four-year-old associate editor (good-looking and arrogant and, in a way, brilliant; more so right now than is necessary), who was here with his wife for supper and read the stories. He and the magazine would (his “reservations” notwithstanding) give anything (except money, of which there’s none) to publish them, though I made it clear that he’d have to contact you about that. I just wanted to know what someone intelligent who didn’t know your true story would make of what you’ve made out of it here. Enclosed note #2 is from Frances Coutell, his wife, who runs Bridges’ office now. A delicate, washed-out beauty of twenty-three, bristling with spiritual needs; also a romantic masochist who, as you will surmise, has developed a crush on you, not least because she doesn’t like you that much. Fiction does different things to different people, much like matrimony.

#1

Dear Joan: As you know I wasn’t one of those who was taken by your brother’s celebrated first novel. I found it much too proper a book, properly decorous and constrained on the formal side, and properly momentous (and much too pointed) in presenting its Serious Jewish Moral Issue. Obviously it was mature for a first novel-too obviously: the work of a gifted literature student strait-jacketed by the idea that fiction is the means for proving righteousness and displaying intelligence; the book seems to me very much a relic of the fifties. The Abraham and Isaac motif, rich with Kierkegaardian overtones, reeks (if I may say so) of those English departments located in the upper reaches of the Himalayas. What I like about the new stories, and why to my mind they represent a tremendous advance over the novel, is that they seem to me a deliberate and largely conscious two-pronged attack upon the prematurely grave and high-minded author of A Jewish Father. As I read it, in “Salad Days” the attack is frontal, head-on, and accomplished by means of social satire, and, more notably, what I’d call tender pornography, a very different thing, say, from the pornography of a Sade or a Terry Southern. For the author of that solemn first novel, a story like “Salad Days” is nothing less than blasphemous. He is to be congratulated heartily for triumphing (at least here) over all that repressive piety and fashionable Jewish angst. “Courting Disaster” is a more complicated case (and as a result not so successful, in a purely literary sense). As I would like to read it, the story is actually a disguised critical essay by Tarnopol on his own overrated first book, a commentary and a judgment on all that principledness that is A Jewish Father’s subject and its downfall. Whether Tarnopol intended it or not, I see in Zuckerman’s devotion to Lydia (its joylessness, its sexless-ness, its scrupulosity, its madly ethical motive) a kind of allegory of Tarnopol and his Muse. To the degree that this is so, to the degree that the character of Zuckerman embothes and represents the misguided and morbid “moral” imagination that produced A]ewish Father, it is fascinating; to the degree that Tarnopol is back on the angst kick, with all that implies about “moving” the reader, I think the story is retrograde, dull, and boring, and suggests that the conventional (rabbinical) side of this writer still has a stranglehold on what is reckless and intriguing in his talent. But whatever my reservations, “Courting Disaster” is well worth publishing, certainly in tandem with “Salad Days,” a story that seems to me the work of a brand new Tarnopol, who, having objectified the high-minded moralist in him (and, hopefully, banished him to Europe forevermore, there to dwell in noble sadness with all the other “cultural monuments and literary landmarks”), has begun at last to flirt with the playful, the perverse, and the disreputable in himself. If Sharon Shatzky is your brother’s new Muse, and a zucchini her magic wand, we may be in for something more valuable than still more fiction that is “moving.” Lane.

#2

Joan: My two cents worth, only because the story L. admires most seems to me smug and vicious and infuriating, all the more so for being so clever and winning. It is pure sadistic trash and I pray (actually) that Bridges doesn’t print it. Art is long, but the life of a little magazine is short, and much too short for this. I hate what he does with that suburban college girl-and I don’t even mean what Zuckerman (the predictable prodigal son who majors in English) does but what the author does, which is just to twist her arm around behind her back and say, “You are not my equal, you can never be my equal-understand?” Who does he think he is, anyway? And why would he want to be such a thing? How could the man who wrote “Courting Disaster” want to write a heartless little story like that? And vice versa? Because the long story is absolutely heartrending and I think (contrary to L.’s cold-blooded analysis) that this is why it works utterly. I was moved to tears by it (but then I didn’t perform brain surgery on it) and moved to the most aching admiration for the man who could just conceive such a story. The wife, the daughter, the husband are painfully true (I’m sure because he made me sure), and I shall never forget them. And Zuckerman here is completely true too, sympathetic, interesting, a believable observer and center of feeling, all the things he has to be. In a strange way they were all sympathetic to me, even the awful ones. Life is awful. Yours, Franny. P.S. I apologize for saying that something your brother wrote is hateful. I don’t know him. And I don’t think I want to. There are enough Jekyll and Hydes around here as it is. You’re an older woman, tell me something. What’s the matter with men? What do they want?