Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

Spielvogel’s reply:

It was thoughtful of you to send on to me your two new stories. I read them with great interest and enjoyment, and as ever, admiration for your skills and understanding. The two stories are so different and yet so expertly done, and to my mind balance each other perfectly. The scenes with Sharon in the first I found especially funny, and in the second the fastidious attention that the narrating voice pays to itself struck me as absolutely right, given his concerns (or “human concerns” as the Zuckerman of “Salad Days” would have said in his undergraduate seminar). What a sad and painful story it is. Moral, too, in the best, most serious way. You appear to be doing very well. I wish you continued success with your work. Sincerely, Otto Spielvogel.

This is the doctor whose ministrations I have renounced? Even if the letter is just a contrivance to woo me back onto his couch, what a lovely and clever contrivance! I wonder whom he has been seeing about his prose style. Now why couldn’t he write about me like that? (Or wasn’t that piece he wrote about me really as bad as I thought? Or was it even worse? And did it matter either way? Surely I know what it’s like having trouble writing up my case in English sentences. I’ve been trying to do it now for years. Then, was ridding myself of him wrong too? Or am I just succumbing-like a narcissist! Oh, he knows his patient, this conjurer…Or am I being too suspicious?)

So: shall I go ahead now and confuse myself further by sending copies of the stories to Susan? to my mother and father? to Dina Dornbusch? to Maureen’s Group? How about to Maureen herself?

Dear Departed: It may cheer you up some to read the enclosed. Little did you know how persuasive you were. Actually had you played your cards right and been just a little less nuts we’d be miserably married yet. Even as it is, your widower thinks practically only of you. Do you think of him in Heaven, or (as I fear) have you set your sights on some big strapping neurotic angel ambivalent about his sexual role? These two stories owe much to your sense of things-you might have conceived of the self-intoxicated princeling of “Salad Days” yourself and called him me; and, allowing for artistic license of course, isn’t Lydia pretty much how you saw yourself (if, that is, you could have seen yourself as you would have had others see you)? How is Eternity, by the way? In the hope that these two stories help to pass the time a little more quickly, I am, your bereaved, Peter.

Out of the whirlwind, a reply:

Dear Peter: I’ve read the stories and found them most amusing, particularly the one that isn’t supposed to be. Your spiritual exertions (m your own behalf) are very touching. I took the liberty (I didn’t imagine you would mind) of passing them on to the Lord. You will be pleased to know that “Courting Disaster” brought a smile to His lips as well. No wrath whatsoever, I’m happy to report, though He did remark (not without a touch of astonishment), “It is all vanity, isn’t it?” The stories are currently making the rounds of the saints, who I’m sure will find your aspiration to their condition rather flattering. The rumor here among the holy martyrs is that you’ve got a new work under way that you say is really going “to tell it like it is.” If so, I expect that means Maureen again. How do you intend to portray me this time? Holding your head on a plate? I think a phallus would increase your sales. But of course you know best how to exploit my memory for high artistic purposes. Good luck with My Martyrdom as a Man, That is to be the title, is it not? All of us here in Heaven look forward to the amusement it is sure to afford those who know you from on high. Your beloved wife, Maureen. P.S. Eternity is fine. Just about long enough to forgive a son of a bitch like you.

And now, class, will you please hand in your papers, and before turning to Dr. Spielvogel’s useful fiction, let us see what you have made of the legends here contrived:

English 312

M &F 1:00-2:30

(assignations by appointment)

Professor Tarnopol

THE USES OF THE USEFUL FICTIONS:

Or, Professor Tarnopol Withdraws

Somewhat from His Feelings

by Karen Oakes

Certainly I do not deny when I am reading that the author may be impassioned, nor even that he might have conceived the first plan of his work under the sway of passion. But his decision to write supposes that he withdraws somewhat from his feelings…

– Sartre, What Is Literature?

On ne feut jamais se connaitre, mais settlement se raconter.

– Simone de Beauvoir

“Salad Days,” the shorter of the two Zuckerman stories assigned for today, attempts by means of comic irony to contrast the glories and triumphs of Nathan Zuckerman’s golden youth with the “misfortune” of his twenties, to which the author suddenly alludes in the closing lines. The author (Professor Tarnopol) does not elucidate in the story the details of that misfortune; indeed, the point he makes is that, by him at least, it cannot be done. “Unfortunately, the author of this story, having himself experienced a similar misfortune at about the same age, does not have it in him, even yet, midway through his thirties, to tell it briefly or to find it funny. ‘Unfortunate,’” concludes the fabricated Zuckerman, speaking in behalf of the dissembling Tarnopol, “because he wonders if that isn’t more the measure of the man than of the misfortune.”

In order to dilute the self-pity that (as I understand it) had poisoned his imagination in numerous previous attempts to fictionalize his unhappy marriage, Professor Tarnopol establishes at the outset here a tone of covert (and, to some small degree, self-congratulatory) self-mockery; this calculated attitude of comic detachment he maintains right on down to the last paragraph, where abruptly the shield of lightheartedness is all at once pierced by the author’s pronouncement that in his estimation the true story really isn’t funny at all. All of which would appear to suggest that if Professor Tarnopol has managed in “Salad Days” to make an artful narrative of his misery, he has done so largely by refusing directly to confront it.

In contrast to “Salad Days,” “Courting Disaster” is marked throughout by a tone of sobriety and an air of deep concern; here is all the heartfeltness that has been suppressed in “Salad Days.” A heroic quality adheres to the suffering of the major characters, and their lives are depicted as far too grave for comedy or satire. The author reports that he began this story intending that his hero should be tricked into marrying exactly as he himself had been. Why that bedeviling incident from Professor Tarnopol’s personal history could not be absorbed into this fictional artifice is not difficult to understand: the Nathan Zuckerman imagined in “Courting Disaster” requires no shotgun held to his head for him to find in the needs and sorrows of Lydia Ketterer the altar upon which to offer up the sacrifice of his manhood. It is not compromising circumstances, but (in both senses) the gravity of his character, that determines his moral career; all the culpability is his.

In “Courting Disaster,” then, Professor Tarnopol conceives of himself and Mrs. Tarnopol as characters in a struggle that, in its moral pathos, veers toward tragedy, rather than Gothic melodrama, or soap opera, or farce, which are the modes that generally obtain when Professor Tarnopol narrates the story of his marriage to me in bed. Likewise, Professor Tarnopol invents cruel misfortunes (i.e., Lydia’s incestuous father, her sadistic husband, her mean little aunts, the illiterate Moonie) to validate and deepen Lydia’s despair and to exacerbate Nathan’s morbid sense of responsibility-this plenitude of heartache, supplying, as it were, “the objective correlative” for the emotions of shame, grief, and guilt that inform the narration.