Philip Roth: My Life As A Man

“Well, it didn’t do him very much good, Mother, did it?”

“WHAT!” Mr. Zuckerman, flabbergasted yet again. “What kind of way is that to talk about your brother, damn it? Who aren’t you better than-please just tell me one name, for the record book at least. Mahatma Gandhi maybe? Yehudi? Oh, do you need some humility knocked into you! Do you need a good stiff course in Dale Carnegie! Your brother happens to be a practicing orthodontist with a wonderful practice and also he is your brother.”

“Dad, brothers can have mixed feelings about one another. I believe you have mixed feelings about your own.”

“But the issue is not my brothers, the issue is yours, don’t confuse the issue, which is your KNOW-IT-ALL ARROGANCE ABOUT LIFE THAT DOESN’T KNOW A GODDAM THING!”

Then Fort Dix: midnights on the firing range, sit-ups in the rain, mounds of mashed potatoes and Del Monte fruit cup for “dinner”-and again, with powdered eggs, at dawn-and before even four of the eight weeks of basic infantry training were over, a graduate of Seton Hall College in his regiment dead of meningitis. Could his father have been right? Had his position on ROTC been nothing short of insane, given the realities of army life and the fact of the Korean War? Could he, a summa cum laude, have made such a ghastly and irreversible mistake? Oh God, suppose he were to come down now with spinal meningitis from having to defecate each morning with a mob of fifty! What a price to pay for having principles about ROTC! Suppose he were to contract the disease while scrubbing out the company’s hundred stinking garbage cans-the job that seemed always to fall to him on his marathon stints of KP. ROTC (as his father had prophesied) would get on very nice without him, ROTC would flourish, but what about the man of principle, would he keel over in a garbage pail, dead before he’d even reached the front lines?

But like Dilsey (of whom Zuckerman alone knew, in his platoon of Puerto Ricans), he endured. Basic training was no small trial, however, particularly coming as quickly as it did upon that last triumphant year at Bass, when his only course but one, taken for nine hours’ credit, was the English honors seminar conducted by Caroline Benson. Along with Bass’s two other most displaced Jews, Zuckerman was the intellectual powerhouse of “The Seminar,” which assembled every Wednesday from three in the afternoon until after six-dusk in the autumn and spring, nightfall in the winter-on Queen Anne dining chairs pulled around the worn Oriental rug in the living room of Miss Benson’s cozy house of books and fireplaces. The seven Christian critics in The Seminar would hardly dare to speak when the three dark Jews (all refugees from the top-drawer Jewish fraternity and founders together of Bass’s first literary magazine since-ah, how he loved to say it-the end of the nineteenth century), when these three Jews got to shouting and gesticulating at one another over Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A spinster (who, unlike his mother, happened not to look half her age), Caroline Benson had been born, like all her American forebears, over in Manchester, then educated at Wellesley and “in England.” As he would learn midway through his college career, “Caroline Benson and her New York Jew” was very much a local tradition, as much a part of Bass as the “hello spirit” the dean of men was so high on, or the football rivalry with the University of Vermont that annually brought the ordinarily respectable campus to a pitch of religious intensity only rarely to be seen in this century beyond the Australian bush. Tire wittier New Englanders on the faculty spoke of “Caroline’s day-vah Jew experience, it always feels like something that’s happened to her in a previous semester…” Yes, he was, as it turned out, one of a line-and didn’t care. Who was Nathan Zuckerman of Camden, New Jersey, to turn his untutored back on the wisdom of a Caroline Benson, educated in England? Why, she had taught him, within the very first hour she had found him in her freshman literature class, to pronounce the g in “length”; by Christmas vacation he had learned to aspirate the h in “whale”; and before the year was out he had put the word “guy” out of his vocabulary for good. Rather she had. Simple to do, too. “There are no ‘guys,’ Mr. Zuckerman, in Pride and Prejudice.” Well, he was glad to learn that, delighted to, in fact. She could singe him to scarlet with a line like that, delivered in that clipped Vermont way of hers, but vain as he was he took it without so much as a whimper-^every criticism and correction, no matter how minute, he took unto himself with the exaltation of a martyred saint.

“I think I should learn to get along better with people,” he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson’s response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerman went around for days repeating the simple interrogative sentence to himself; like Of Time and the River, it verified something he had known in his bones all along, but in which he could not place his faith until it had been articulated by someone of indisputable moral prestige and purity: “Why,” Caroline Benson asked the seventeen-year-old boy, “should you want to learn a thing like that?”

The afternoon in May of his senior year when he was invited-not Osterwald who had been invited, not Fischbach, but Zuckerman, the chosen of the Chosen-to take tea with Caroline Benson in the “English” garden back of her house, had been, without question, the most civilized four hours of his life. He had been directed by Miss Benson to bring along with him the senior honors paper he had just completed, and there in a jacket and tie, amid the hundreds of varieties of flowers, none of whose names he knew (except for the rose), sipping as little tea as he could politely get away with (he was unable as yet to dissociate hot tea with lemon from the childhood sickbed) and munching on watercress sandwiches (which he had never even heard of before that afternoon-and wouldn’t miss, if he didn’t hear of them again), he read aloud to Miss Benson his thirty-page paper entitled, “Subdued Hysteria: A Study of the Undercurrent of Agony in Some Novels of Virginia Woolf.” The paper was replete with all those words that now held such fascination for him, but which he had hardly, if ever, uttered back in the living room in Camden: “irony” and “values” and “fate,” “will” and “vision” and “authenticity,” and, of course, “human,” for which he had a particular addiction. He had to be cautioned repeatedly in marginal notes about his relentless use of that word. “Unnecessary,” Miss Benson would write. “Redundant.” “Mannered.” Well, maybe unnecessary to her, but not to the novice himself: human character, human possibility, human error, human anguish, human tragedy. Suffering and failure, the theme of so many of the novels that “moved” him, were “human conditions” about which he could speak with an astonishing lucidity and even gravity by the time he was a senior honors student-astonishing in that he was, after all, someone whose own sufferings had by and large been confined up till then to the dentist’s chair.

They discussed first the paper, then the future. Miss Benson expected him after the army to continue his literary studies at either Oxford or Cambridge. She thought it would be a good idea for Nathan to spend a summer bicycling around England to see the great cathedrals. That sounded all right to him. They did not embrace at the end of that perfect afternoon, but only because of Miss Benson’s age, position, and character. Zuckerman had been ready and willing, the urge in him to embrace and be embraced all but overpowering.