Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

Right now I get no advice about Susan from anyone. I am here to be free of advisers-and temptation. Susan a temptation? Susan a temptress? What a word to describe her! Yet I have never ached for anyone like this before. As the saying goes, we’d been through a lot together, and not in the way that Maureen and I had been “through it.” With Maureen it was the relentless sameness of the struggle that nearly drove me mad; no matter how much reason or intelligence or even brute force I tried to bring to bear upon our predicament, I could not change a thing-everything I did was futile, including of course doing nothing. With Susan there was struggle all right, but then there were rewards. Things changed. We changed. There was progress, development, marvelous and touching transformations all around. Surely the last thing you could say was that ours was a comfortable, settled arrangement that came to an end because our pleasures had become tiresome and stale. No, the progress was the pleasure, the transformations what gave me most delight-which is what has made her attempt at suicide so crushing…what makes my yearning for her all the more bewildering. Because now it looks as though nothing has changed, and we are back where we began. I have to wonder if the letters I begin to write to her and leave unfinished, if the phone calls I break off dialing before the last digit, if that isn’t me beginning to give way to the siren song of The Woman Who Cannot Live Without You, She Who Would Rather Be Dead Than Unwed-if this isn’t me on the brink again of making My Mistake, contriving to continue, after a brief intermission, what Spielvogel would call my narcissistic melodrama…But then it is no less distressing for me to think that out of fear of My Mistake, I am making another even worse: relinquishing for no good reason the generous, gentle, good-hearted, ww-Maureenish woman with whom I have actually come to be in love. I think to myself, “Take this yearning seriously. You want her,” and I rush to the phone to call down to Princeton-and then at the phone I ask myself if “love” has very much to do with it, if it isn’t the vulnerability and brokenness, the neediness, to which I am being drawn. Suppose it is really nothing more than a helpless beauty in a bikini bathing suit taking hold of my cock as though it were a lifeline, suppose it is only that that inspires this longing. Such things have been known to happen. “Sexual vanity,” as Mrs. Seabury says. “Rescue fantasies,” says Dr. Spielvogel, “boyish dreams of Oedipal glory.” “Fucked-up shiksas,” my brother says, “you can’t resist them, Pep.”

Meanwhile Susan remains under the care of her mother in Princeton, and I remain up here, under my own.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your hair.

– from the Grimms’ fairy tale

For those young men who reached their maturity in the fifties, and who aspired to be grown-up during that decade, when as one participant has written, everyone wanted to be thirty, there was considerable moral prestige in taking a wife, and hardly because a wife was going to be one’s maidservant or “sexual object.” Decency and Maturity, a young man’s “seriousness,” were at issue precisely because it was thought to be the other way around: in that the great world was so obviously a man’s, it was only within marriage that an ordinary woman could hope to find equality and dignity. Indeed, we were led to believe by the defenders of womankind of our era that we were exploiting and degrading the women we didn’t marry, rather than the ones we did. Unattached and on her own, a woman was supposedly not even able to go to the movies or out to a restaurant by herself, let alone perform an appendectomy or drive a truck. It was up to us then to give them the value and the purpose that society at large withheld-by marrying them. If we didn’t marry women, who would? Ours, alas, was the only sex available for the job: the draft was on.

No wonder then that a young college-educated bourgeois male of my generation who scoffed at the idea of marriage for himself, who would just as soon eat out of cans or in cafeterias, sweep his own floor, make his own bed, and come and go with no binding legal attachments, finding female friendship and sexual adventure where and when he could and for no longer than he liked, laid himself open to the charge of “immaturity,” if not “latent” or blatant “homosexuality.” Or he was just plain “selfish.” Or he was “frightened of responsibility.” Or he could not “commit himself” (nice institutional phrase, that) to “a permanent relationship.” Worst of all, most shameful of all, the chances were that this person who thought he was perfectly able to take care of himself on his own was in actuality “unable to love.”

An awful lot of worrying was done in the fifties about whether people were able to love or not-I venture to say, much of it by young women in behalf of the young men who didn’t particularly want them to wash their socks and cook their meals and bear their children and then tend them for the rest of their natural days. “But aren’t you capable of loving anyone? Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?” when translated from desperate fifties-feminese into plain English, generally meant “I want to get married and I want you to get married to.”

Now I am sure that many of the young women of that period who set themselves up as specialists in loving hadn’t a very clear idea of how strong a charge their emotions got from the instinct for survival-or how much those emotions arose out of the yearning to own and be owned, rather than from a reservoir of pure and selfless love that was the special property of themselves and their gender. After all, how lovable are men? Particularly men “unable to love”? No, there was more to all that talk about “commitment” and “permanent relationships” than many young women (and their chosen mates) were able to talk about or able at that time fully to understand: the more was the fact of female dependence, defenselessness, and vulnerability.

This hard fact of life was of course experienced and dealt with by women in accordance with personal endowments of intelligence and sanity and character. One imagines that there were brave and genuinely self-sacrificing decisions made by women who refused to accede to those profoundest of self-delusions, the ones that come cloaked in the guise of love; likewise, there was much misery in store for those who were never able to surrender their romantic illusions about the arrangement they had made in behalf of their helplessness, until they reached the lawyer’s office, and he threw their way that buoy known as alimony. It has been said that those ferocious alimony battles that have raged in the courtrooms of this country during the last few decades, the way religious wars raged throughout Europe in the seventeenth century, were really “symbolic” in nature. My guess is that rather than serving as a symbol around which to organize other grievances and heartaches, the alimony battle frequently tended to clarify what was generally obscured by the metaphors with which marital arrangements were camouflaged by the partners themselves. The extent of the panic and rage aroused by the issue of alimony, the ferocity displayed by people who were otherwise sane and civilized enough, testifies, I think, to the shocking-and humiliating-realization that came to couples in the courtroom about the fundamental role that each may actually have played in the other’s life. “So, it has descended to this,” the enraged contestants might say, glaring in hatred at one another-but even that was only an attempt to continue to hide from the most humiliating fact of all: that it really was this, all along.