Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

My brother Morris, to whom copies of my latest stories were also sent in response to a letter inquiring about my welfare, had his own trenchant comments to make on “Courting Disaster-comments not so unlike Joan’s.

What is it with you Jewish writers? Madeleine Herzog, Deborah Rojack, the curie-pie castrator in After the Fall, and isn’t the desirable shiksa of A New Life a kvetch and titless in the bargain? And now, for the further delight of the rabbis and the reading public, Lydia Zuckerman, that Gentile tomato. Chicken soup in every pot, and a Grushenka in every garage. With all the Dark Ladies to choose from, you luftmenschen can really pick ‘em. Peppy, why are you still wasting your talent on that Dead End Kid? Leave her to Heaven, okay? I’m speaking at Boston University at the end of the month, not that far from you. If you’re still up on the mountain, come down and stay at the Commander with me. My subject is “Rationality, Planning, and Gratification Deferral.” You could stand hearing about a and b; as for c, would you, a leading contender for the tide in the highly competitive Jewish Novelist Division, agree to give a black belt demonstration in same to the assembled students of social behavior? Peppy, enough with her already!

Back in 1960, following a public lecture I had delivered (my first) at Berkeley, Joan and Alvin gave a party for me at the house they had then up on a ridge in Palo Alto. Maureen and I had just returned to the U.S. from our year at the American Academy in Rome, and I had accepted a two-year appointment as “writer-in-residence” at the University of Wisconsin. In the previous twelve months I had become (according to an article in the Sunday Times book section) “the golden boy of American literature”; for A Jewish Father, my first novel, I had received the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim grant of thirty-eight hundred dollars, and then my invitation to teach at Wisconsin. I myself had expected no less, back then; it was not my good fortune that surprised me at the age of twenty-seven.

Some sixty or seventy of their friends had been invited by Joan and Alvin to meet me; Maureen and I lost sight of one another only a few minutes after our arrival, and when she turned up at my side some time later I was talking rather self-consciously to an extremely seductive looking young beauty of about my own age, self-conscious precisely for fear of the scene of jealous rage that proximity to such a sexpot would inevitably provoke.

Maureen pretended at first that I was talking to no one; she wanted to go, she announced, all these “phonies” were more than she could take. I decided to ignore the remark-I did not know what else to do. Draw a sword and cut her head off? I didn’t carry a sword at the time. I carried a stone face. The beautiful girl-from her décolletage it would have appeared that she was something of a daring tastemaker herself; I was too ill at ease, however, to make inquiries of a personal nature-the girl was asking me who my editor was. I told her his name; I said he happened also to be a good poet. “Oh, how could you!” whispered Maureen, and, her eyes all at once flooded with tears; instantly she turned and disappeared into a bathroom. I found Joan within a few minutes and told her that Maureen and I had to go-it had been a long day and Maureen wasn’t feeling well. “Pep,” said Joan, taking my hand in hers, “why are you doing this to yourself?” “Doing what?” “Her,” she said. I pretended not to know what she was talking about. Just presented her with my stone face. In the taxi to the hotel, Maureen wept like a child, repeatedly hammering at her knees (and mine) with her little fists. “How could you embarrass me like that-how could you say that, with me right there at your side!” “Say what?” “You know damn well, Peter! Say that Walter is your editor!” “But he is.” “What about me?” she cried. “You?” “I’m your editor-you know very well I am! Only you refuse to admit it! I read every word you write, Peter. I make suggestions. I correct your spelling.” “Those are typos, Maureen.” “But 1 correct them! And then some rich bitch sticks her tits in your face and asks who your editor is and you say Walter! Why must you demean me like this-oh, why did you do that in front of that empty-headed girl? Just because she was all over you with those tits of hers? Mine are as big as hers-touch them some day and you’ll see!” “Maureen, not this, not again-!” “Yes, again! And again and again! Because you will not change!” “But she meant my editor at my publishing house!” “But I’m your editor!” “You’re not!” “I suppose I’m not your wife either! Why are you so ashamed of me! In front of those phonies, no less! People who wouldn’t look twice at you if you weren’t this month’s cover boy! Oh, you baby! You infant! You hopeless egomaniac! Must you always be at the center of everything?” The next morning, before we left for the airport, Joan telephoned to the hotel to say goodbye. ‘We’re always here,” she told me. “I know.” “If you want to come out and stay.” ‘Well, thank you,” I said, as formally as if I were acknowledging an offer from a perfect stranger, “maybe we’ll take you up on it sometime.” “I’m talking about you. Just you. You don’t have to suffer like this, Peppy. You’re proving nothing by being miserable, nothing at all.” As soon as I hung up, Maureen said, “Oh, you could really have all the beautiful girls, couldn’t you, Peter-with your sister out procuring for you. Oh, she would really enjoy that, I’m sure.” ‘What the hell are you talking about now?” “That deprived little look on your face-’Oh, if I wasn’t saddled with this witch, couldn’t I have a time of it, screwing away to my heart’s content at all the vapid twittering ingénues!’” “Again, Maureen? Again? Can’t you at least let twenty-four hours go by?” ‘Well, what about that girl last night who wanted to know who your editor was? Oh, she really cared about that, I’m sure. Well, be honest, Peter, didn’t you want to fuck her? You couldn’t take your eyes off those tits of hers.” “I suppose I noticed them.” “Oh, I suppose you did.” “Though apparently not so much as you, Maureen.” “Oh, don’t use your sardonic wit on me! Admit it! You did want to fuck her. You were dying to fuck her.” “The fact of it is, I was close to catatonic in her presence.” “Yes, suppressing all that goddam lust! How hard you have to work to suppress it-with everybody but me! Oh, admit it, tell the truth for once- if you had been alone, you know damn well you would have had her back here in this hotel! On this very bed! And she at least would have gotten laid last night! Which is more than I can say for me! Oh, why do you punish me like this-why do you lust after every woman in this whole wide world, except your own wife.”

My family…In marked contrast to Joan and Alvin and their children Mab, Melissa, Kim, and Anthony, are my elder brother Morris, his wife Lenore, and the twins, Abner and Davey. In their home the dominant social concern is not with the accumulation of goods, but the means by which society can facilitate their equitable distribution. Morris is an authority on underdeveloped nations; his trips to Africa and the Caribbean are conducted under the auspices of the UN Commission for Economic Rehabilitation, one of several international bothes to which Moe serves as a consultant. He is a man who worries over everything, but nothing (excluding his family), nothing so much as social and economic inequality; what is now famous as “the culture of poverty” has been a heartbreaking obsession with him since the days he used to come home cursing with frustration from his job with the Jewish Welfare Board in the Bronx-during the late thirties, he worked there days while going to school nights at N.Y.U. After the war he married an adoring student, today a kindly, devoted, nervous, quiet woman, who some years ago, when the twins went off to kindergarten, enrolled at the School of Library Service at Columbia to take a master’s degree. She is now a librarian for the city of New York. The twins are fifteen; last year both refused to leave the local upper West Side public school to become students at Horace Mann. On two consecutive days they were roughed up and robbed of their pennies by a Puerto Rican gang that has come to terrorize the corridors, lavatories, and basketball courts back of their school-nonetheless, they have refused to become “private school hypocrites,” which is how they describe their neighborhood friends, the sons and daughters of Columbia faculty who have been removed from the local schools by their parents. To Morris, who worries continuously for their safety, the children shout indignantly, “How can you, of all people, suggest Horace Mann! How can you betray your own ideals! You’re just as bad as Uncle Alvin! Worse!”