Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

…And so it went, my chagrin renewed practically with each word. I could not read a sentence in which it did not seem to me that the observation was off, the point missed, the nuance blurred-in short, the evidence rather munificently distorted so as to support a narrow and un illuminating thesis at the expense of the ambiguous and perplexing actuality. In all there were only two pages of text on the “Italian-American poet,” but so angered and disappointed was I by what seemed to me the unflagging wrongness of the description of my case, that it took me ten minutes to get from the top of page 85 to the bottom of 86. “…enormous ambivalence about leaving his wife…It soon became clear that the poet’s central problem here as elsewhere was his castration anxiety vis-a-vis a phallic mother figure…” Not so! His central problem here as elsewhere derives from nothing of the sort. That will not serve to explain his “enormous ambivalence” about leaving his wife any more than it describes the prevailing emotional tone of his childhood years, which was one of intense security. “His father was a harassed man, ineffectual and submissive to his mother…” What? Now where did you get that idea? My father was harassed, all right, but not by his wife-any child who lived in the same house with them knew that much. He was harassed by his own adamant refusal to allow his three children or his wife to do without: he was harassed by his own vigor, by his ambitions, by his business, by the times. By his overpowering commitment to the idea of Family and the religion he made of Doing A Man’s Job! My “ineffectual” father happened to have worked twelve hours a day, six and seven days a week, often simultaneously at two exhausting jobs, with the result that not even when the store was as barren of customers as the Arctic tundra, did his loved ones lack for anything essential. Broke and overworked, no better off than a serf or an indentured servant in the America of the thirties, he did not take to drink, jump out of the window, or beat his wife and kids-and by the time he sold Tarnopol’s Haberdashery and retired two years ago, he was making twenty thousand bucks a year. Good Christ, Spielvogel, from whose example did I come to associate virility with hard work and self-discipline, if not from my father’s? Why did I like to go down to the store on Saturdays and spend all day in the stockroom arranging and stacking the boxes of goods? In order to hang around an ineffectual father? Why did I listen like Desdemona to Othello when he used to lecture the customers on Interwoven socks and McGregor shirts-because he was had at it? Don’t kid yourself-and the other psychiatrists. It was because I was so proud of his affiliation with those big brand names-because his pitch was so convincing. It wasn’t his wife’s hostility he had to struggle against, but the world’s! And he did it, with splitting headaches to be sure, hut without giving in. I’ve told you that a hundred times. Why don’t you believe me? Why, to substantiate your “ideas,” do you want to create this fiction about me and my family, when your gift obviously lies elsewhere. Let me make up stories-you make sense! “…in order to avoid a confrontation with his dependency needs toward his wife the poet acted out sexually with other women almost from the beginning of his marriage.” But that just is not so! You must be thinking of some other poet. Look, is this supposed to be an amalgam of the ailing, or me alone? Who was there to “act out” with other than Karen? Doctor, I had a desperate affair with that girl-hopeless and ill-advised and adolescent, that may well be, but also passionate, also painful, also warm-hearted, which was what the whole thing was about to begin with: I was dying for some humanness in my life, that’s why I reached out and touched her hair! And oh yes, I fucked a prostitute in Naples after a forty-eight hour fight with Maureen in our hotel. And another in Venice, correct-making two in all. Is that what you call “acting out” with “other women almost from the beginning of his marriage”? The marriage only lasted three years! It was all “almost” the beginning. And why don’t you mention how it began? “…he once picked up a girl at a party…” But that was here in New York, months and months after I had left Maureen in Wisconsin. The marriage was over, even if the state of New York refused to allow that to be so! “…the poet acted out his anger in his relationships with women, reducing all women to masturbatory sexual objects…” Now, do you really mean to say that? All women? Is that what Karen Oakes was to me, “a masturbatory sexual object”? Is that what Susan McCall is to me now? Is that why I have encouraged and cajoled and berated her into going back to finish her schooling, because she is “a masturbatory sexual object”? Is that why I nearly give myself a stroke each night trying to help her to come? Look, let’s get down to the case of cases: Maureen. Do you think that’s what she was to me, “a masturbatory sexual object”? Good God, what a reading of my story that is! Rather than reducing that lying, hysterical bitch to an object of any kind, I made the grotesque mistake of elevating her to the status of a human being toward whom I had a moral responsibility. Nailed myself with my romantic morality to the cross of her desperation! Or, if you prefer, caged myself in with my cowardice! And don’t tell me that was out of “guilt” for having already made of her “a masturbatory sexual object” because you just can’t have it both ways! Had I actually been able to treat her as some goddam “object,” or simply to see her for what she was, I would never have done my manly duty and married her! Did it ever occur to you, Doctor, in the course of your ruminations, that maybe I was the one who was made into a sexual object? You’ve got it all backwards, Spielvogel-inside out! And how can that be? How can you, who have done me so much good, have it all so wrong? Now there is something to write an article about! That is a subject for a symposium! Don’t you see, it isn’t that women mean too little to me-what’s caused the trouble is that they mean so much. The testing ground, not for potency, but virtue! Believe me, if I’d listened to my prick instead of to my upper organs, I would never have gotten into this mess to begin with! I’d still be fucking Dina Dornbusch! And she’d have been my wife!

What I read next brought me up off the ottoman and to my feet, as though in a terrifying dream my name had finally been called-then I remembered that blessedly it was not a Jewish novelist in his late twenties or early thirties called Tarnopol, but a nameless Italian-American poet in his forties that Spielvogel claimed to be describing (and diagnosing) for his colleagues. “…leaving his semen on fixtures, towels, etc., so completely libidinized was his anger; on another occasion, he dressed himself in nothing but his wife’s underpants, brassiere, and stockings…?” Stockings? Oh, I didn’t put on her stockings, damn it! Can’t you get anything right? And it was not at all “another occasion”! One, she had just drawn blood from her wrist with my razor; two, she had just confessed (a) to perpetrating a fraud to get me to marry her and (b) to keeping it secret from me for three wretched years of married life; three, she had just threatened to put Karen’s “pure little face” in every newspaper in Wisconsin-Then came the worst of it, what made the protective disguise of the Italian-American poet so ludicrous…In the very next paragraph Spielvogel recounted an incident from my childhood that I had myself narrated somewhat more extensively in the autobiographical New Yorker story published above my name the previous month.