Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

My dispute with Spielvogel arose over an article he had written for the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies and published in a special number focusing on “The Riddle of Creativity.” I happened to catch sight of the magazine on his desk as I was leaving the office one evening in the third year of my analysis-noticed the symposium tide on the cover and then his name among the contributors listed below. I asked if I might borrow it to read his paper. He answered, “Of course,” though it seemed to me that before issuing gracious consent, a look of distress, or alarm, had crossed his face-as though anticipating (correctly) what my reaction to the piece would be…But if so, why had the magazine been displayed so conspicuously on the desk I passed every evening leaving his office? Since he knew that like most literary people I as a matter of course scan the titles of all printed matter lying out in the open-by now he had surely observed that reading-man’s tic in me a hundred times-it would seem that either he didn’t care one way or another whether I noticed the Forum, or that he actually wanted me to see his name on the magazine’s cover and read his contribution. Why then the split second of alarm? Or was I, as he was inevitably to suggest later, merely “projecting” my own “anticipatory anxiety” onto him?

“Am I submitted in evidence?” I asked, speaking in a mild, jesting tone, as though it was as unlikely as it was likely and didn’t matter to me either way. “Yes,” answered Spielvogel. “Well,” said I, and pretended to be taken aback a little in order to hide just how surprised I was. “I’ll read it tonight.” Spielvogel’s polite smile now obscured entirely whatever that might really mean to him.

As was now my custom, after the six o’clock session with Dr. Spielvogel, I walked from his office at Eighty-ninth and Park down to Susan’s apartment, ten blocks to the south. It was a little more than a year since Susan had become an undergraduate at City College, and our life together had taken on a predictable and pleasant orderliness-pleasant, for me, for being so predictable. I wanted nothing more than day after day without surprises; just the sort of repetitious experience that drove other people wild with boredom was the most gratifying thing I could imagine. I was high on routine and habit.

During the day, while Susan was off at school, I went home and wrote, as best I could, in my apartment on West Twelfth Street. On Wednesdays I went off in the morning to Long Island (driving my brother’s car), where I spent the day at Hofstra, teaching my two classes and in between having conferences with my writing students. Student stories were just beginning at this time to turn heavily “psychedelic”-undergraduate romantics of my own era had called their unpunctuated pages of random associations “stream-of-consciousness” writing-and to take “dope” smoking as their subject. As I happened to be largely uninterested in drug-inspired visions or the conversation that attended them, and rather impatient with writing that depended for its force upon unorthodox typographical arrangements or marginal decorations in Magic Marker, I found teaching creative writing even less rewarding than it had been back in Wisconsin, where at least there had been Karen Oakes. My other course, however, an honors reading seminar in a dozen masterpieces of my own choosing, had an unusually powerful hold on me, and I taught the class with a zealousness and vehemence that left me limp at the end of my two hours. I did not completely understand what inspired this state of manic excitement or produced my molten volubility until the course had evolved over a couple of semesters and I realized what the principle of selection was that lay behind my reading list from the masters. At the outset I had thought I was just assigning great works of fiction that I admired and wanted my fifteen senior literature students to read and admire too-only in time did I realize that a course whose core had come to be The Brothers Karamazov, The Scarlet Letter, The Trial, Death in Venice, Anna Karenina, and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas derived of course from the professor’s steadily expanding extracurricular interest in the subject of transgression and punishment.

In the city at the end of my workday I would generally walk the seventy-odd blocks to Spielvogel’s office-for exercise and to unwind after yet another session at the desk trying, with little success, to make art out of my disaster, but also in the vain attempt to get myself to feel like something other than a foreigner being held against his will in a hostile and alien country. A small-city boy to begin with (growing up in Yonkers in the thirties and forties, I probably had more in common with youngsters raised in Terre Haute or Altoona than in any of the big New York boroughs), I could not see a necessary or sufficient reason for my being a resident of the busiest, most congested spot on earth, especially since what I required above all for my kind of work were solitude and quiet. My brief tenure on the Lower East Side following my discharge from the service certainly evoked no nostalgia; when, shortly after my day in court with Maureen, I hiked crosstown one morning from West Twelfth Street to Tompkins Square Park, it was not to reawaken fond memories of the old neighborhood, but to search through the scruffy little park and the rundown streets nearby for the woman from whom Maureen had bought a specimen of urine some three and a half years earlier. In a morning of hunting around, I of course saw numerous Negro women of childbearing age out in the park and in the aisles of the local supermarket and climbing on and off buses on Avenues A and B, but I did not approach a single one of them to ask if perchance back in March of 1959 she had entered into negotiations with a short, dark-haired young woman from “a scientific organization,” and if so, to ask if she would now (for a consideration) come along to my lawyer’s office to sign an affidavit testifying that the urine submitted to the pharmacist as Mrs. Tarnopol’s had in actuality been her own. Enraged and frustrated as I was by the outcome of the separation hearing, crazed enough to spend an entire morning on this hopeless and useless undercover operation, I was never completely possessed.

Or is that what I am now, living here and writing this?

My point is that by and large to me Manhattan was: one, the place to which I had come in 1958 as a confident young man starting out on a promising literary career, only to wind up deceived there into marriage with a woman for whom I had lost all affection and respect; and two, the place to which I had returned in 1962, in flight and seeking refuge, only to be prevented by the local judiciary from severing the marital bond that had all but destroyed my confidence and career. To others perhaps Fun City and Gotham and the Big Apple, the Great White Way of commerce and finance and art-to me the place where I paid through the nose. The number of people with whom I shared my life in this most populous of cities could be seated comfortably around a kitchen table, and the Manhattan square footage toward which I felt an intimate attachment and considered essential to my well-being and survival would have fit, with room to spare, into the Yonkers apartment in which I’d been raised. There was my own small apartment on West Twelfth Street-rather, the few square feet holding my desk and my wastebasket; on Seventy-ninth and Park, at Susan’s, there was the dining table where we ate together, the two easy chairs across from one another where we read in her living room at night, and the double bed we shared; ten blocks north of Susan’s there was a psychoanalyst’s couch, rich with personal associations; and up on West 107th Street, Morris’s cluttered little study, where I went once a month or so, as often willingly as not, to be big-brothered-that being the northernmost pin on this runaway husband’s underground railway map of New York. The remaining acreage of this city of cities was just there- as were those multitudes of workers and traders and executives and clerks with whom I had no connection whatsoever- and no matter which “interesting” and lively route I took to Spielvogel’s office at the end of each day, whether I wandered up through the garment district, or Times Square, or the diamond center, or by way of the old bookstores on Fourth Avenue, or through the zoo in Central Park, I could never make a dent in my feeling of foreignness or alter my sense of myself as someone who had been detained here by the authorities, stopped in transit like that great paranoid victim and avenger of injustice in the Kleist novella that I taught with such passion out at Hofstra.