Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

One anecdote to illustrate the dimensions of my cell and the thickness of the walls. Late one afternoon in the fall of ‘64, on my way up to Spielvogel’s, I had stopped off at Schulte’s secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue and descended to the vast basement where thousands of “used” novels are alphabetically arranged for sale in rows of bookshelves twelve feet high. Moving slowly through that fiction warehouse, I made my way eventually to the Ts. And there it was: my book. To one side Sterne, Styron, and Swift, to the other Thackeray, Thurber, and Trol-lope. In the middle (as I saw it) a secondhand copy of A Jewish Father, in its original blue and white jacket. I took it down and opened to the flyleaf. It had been given to “Paula” by “Jay” in April i960. Wasn’t that the very month that Maureen and I had it out amid the blooming azaleas on the Spanish Steps? I looked to see if there were markings on any of the pages, and then I placed the book back where I had found it, between A Tale of a Tub and Henry Esmond. To see out in the world, and in such company, this memento of my triumphant apprenticeship had set my emotions churning, the pride and hopelessness all at once. “That bitch!” said I, just as a teenage boy, cradling half a dozen books in his arms, and wearing a washed-out gray cotton jacket, noiselessly approached me on his sneakers. An employee, I surmised, of Schulte’s lower depths. “Yes?” “Excuse me,” he said, “is your name Peter Tarnopol by any chance, sir?” I colored a little. “It is.” “The novelist?” I nodded my head, and then he turned a very rich red himself. Uncertain clearly as to what to say next, he suddenly blurted, “I mean-what ever happened to you?” I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I told him, “I’m waiting to find out myself.” The next instant I was out into the ferment and pressing north: skirting the office workers springing from the revolving doors and past me down into the subway stations, I plunged through the scrimmage set off by the traffic light at each intersection-down the field I charged, cutting left and right through the faceless counterforce, until at last I reached Eighty-ninth Street, and dropping onto the couch, delivered over to my confidant and coach what I had carried intact all the way from Schulte’s crypt-the bookboy’s heartfelt question that had been blurted out at me so sweetly, and my own bemused reply. That was all I had heard through the world-famous midtown din which travelers journey halfway round the globe to behold.

So then: after paying my call on the doctor, I would head on down to Susan’s for dinner and to spend the evening, the two of us most nights reading in those easy chairs on either side of the fireplace, until at midnight we went to bed, and before sleep, regularly devoted ourselves for some fifteen or twenty minutes to our mutual effort at erotic rehabilitation. In the morning Susan was up and out by seven thirty-Dr. Golding’s first patient of the day-and about an hour later I departed myself, book in hand, only occasionally now getting a look from one of the residents who thought that if the young widow McCall had fallen to a gentleman caller of the Israelite persuasion in baggy corduroy trousers and scuffed suede shoes, she might at least instruct him to enter and exit by way of the service elevator. Still, if not suitably haut bourgeois for Susan’s stately co-op, I was in most ways leading the “regular and orderly” life that Flaubert had recommended for him who would be “violent and original” in his work.

And the work, I thought, was beginning to show it. At least there was beginning to be work that I did not feel I had to consign, because it was so bad, to the liquor carton at the bottom of my closet. In the previous year I had completed three short stories: one had been published in the New Yorker, one in the Kenyon Review, and the third was to appear in Harper’s. They constituted the first fiction of mine in print since the publication of A Jewish Father in 1959. The three stories, simple though they were, demonstrated a certain clarity and calm that had not been the hallmark of my writing over the previous years; inspired largely by incidents from boyhood and adolescence that I had recollected in analysis, they had nothing to do with Maureen and the urine and the marriage. That book, based upon my misadventures in manhood, I still, of course, spent maddening hours on every day, and I had some two thousand pages of manuscript in the liquor carton to prove it. By now the various abandoned drafts had gotten so shuffled together and interwoven, the pages so defaced with Xs and arrows of a hundred different intensities of pen and pencil, the margins so tattooed with comments, reminders, with schemes for pagination (Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, letter of the alphabet in complex combinations that even I, the cryptographer, could no longer decode) that what impressed one upon attempting to penetrate that prose was not the imaginary world it depicted, but the condition of the person who’d been doing the imagining: the manuscript was the message, and the message was Turmoil. I had, in fact, found a quotation from Flaubert appropriate to my failure, and had copied it out of my worn volume of his correspondence (a book purchased during my army stint to help tide me over to civilian life); I had Scotch-taped the quotation to the carton bearing those five hundred thousand words, not a one of them juste . It seemed to me it might be a fitting epitaph to that effort, when and if I was finally going to have to call it quits. Flaubert, to his mistress Louise Colet, who had published a poem maligning their contemporary, Alfred de Musset: “You wrote with a personal emotion that distorted your outlook and made it impossible to keep before your eyes the fundamental principles that must underlie any imaginative composition. It has no aesthetic. You have turned art into an outlet for passion, a kind of chamberpot to catch an overflow. It smells bad; it smells of hate!”

But if I could not leave off picking at the corpse and remove it from the autopsy room to the grave, it was because this genius, who had done so much to form my literary conscience as a student and an aspiring novelist, had also written-

Art, like the Jewish God, wallows in sacrifice.

And:

In Art…the creative impulse is essentially fanatic.

And:

…the excesses of the great masters! They pursue an idea to its furthermost limits.

These inspirational justifications for what Dr. Spielvogel might describe simply as “a fixation due to a severe traumatic experience” I also copied out on strips of paper and (with some self-irony, I must say) taped them too, like so many fortune-cookie ribbons, across the face of the box containing my novel-in-chaos. On the evening that I arrived at Susan’s with the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies in my hand, I called hello from the door, but instead of going to the kitchen, as was my habit-how I habituated myself during those years! how I coveted whatever orderliness I had been able to reestablish in my life!- to chat with her from a stool while she prepared our evening’s delicacies, I went into the living room and sat on the edge of Jamey’s flame-stitch ottoman, reading quickly through Spielvogel’s article, entitled “Creativity: The Narcissism of the Artist.” Somewhere in the middle of the piece I came upon what I’d been looking for-at least I supposed this was it: “A successful Italian-American poet in his forties entered into therapy because of anxiety states experienced as a result of his enormous ambivalence about leaving his wife…” Up to this point in the article, the patients described by Spielvogel had been “an actor,” “a painter,” and “a composer”-so this had to be me. Only I had not been in my forties when I first became Spielvogel’s patient; I’d come to him at age twenty-nine, wrecked by a mistake I’d made at twenty-six. Surely between a man in his forties and a man in his twenties there are differences of experience, expectation, and character that cannot be brushed aside so easily as this…And “successful”? Does that word (in my mind, I immediately began addressing Spielvogel directly), does that word describe to you the tenor of my life at that time? A “successful” apprenticeship, absolutely, but when I came to you in 1962, at age twenty-nine, I had for three years been writing fiction I couldn’t stand, and I could no longer even teach a class without fear of Maureen rushing in to “expose” me to my students. Successful? His forties? And surely it goes without saying that to disguise (in my brother’s words) “a nice civilized Jewish boy” as something called “an Italian-American,” well, that is to be somewhat dim-witted about matters of social and cultural background that might well impinge upon a person’s psychology and values. And while we’re at it, Dr. Spielvogel, a poet and a novelist have about as much in common as a jockey and a diesel driver. Somebody ought to tell you that, especially since “creativity” is your subject here. Poems and novels arise out of radically different sensibilities and resemble each other not at all, and you cannot begin to make sense about “creativity” or “the artist” or even “narcissism” if you are going to be so insensitive to fundamental distinctions having to do with age, accomplishment, background, and vocation. And if I may, sir- his self is to many a novelist what his own physiognomy is to a painter of portraits: the closest subject at hand demanding scrutiny, a problem for his art to solve-given the enormous obstacles to truthfulness, the artistic problem. He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself. That’s where the excitement comes in. That hard conscious work that makes it art! Freud, Dr. Spielvogel, studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?