Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“Come off it, please. Don’t hit me over the head with the ‘narcissism’ again. You know why I want to stay on.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m scared to be out there alone. But also because I am stronger-things in my life are better. Because staying with you, I was finally able to leave Maureen. That was no inconsequential matter for me, you know. If I hadn’t left her, I’d be dead-dead or in jail. You may drink that’s an exaggeration, but I happen to know that it’s true. What I’m saying is that on the practical side, on the subject of my everyday life, you have been a considerable help to me. You’ve been with me through some bad times. You’ve prevented me from doing some wild and foolish things. Obviously I haven’t been coming here three times a week for two years for no reason. But all that doesn’t mean that this article is something I can just forget.”

“But there is really nothing more to be said about it. We have discussed it now for a week. We have been over it thoroughly. There is nothing new to add.”

“You could add that you were wrong.”

“I have answered the charge already and more than once. I don’t find anything I did ‘wrong.’”

“It was wrong, it was at the very least imprudent, for you to use that incident in your article, knowing as you did that I was using it in a story.”

“We were writing simultaneously, I explained that to you.”

“But I told you I was using it in the Anne Frank story.”

“You are not remembering correctly. I did not know you had used it until I read the story last month in the New Yorker. By then the article was at the printer’s.”

“You could have changed it then-left that incident out. And I am not remembering incorrectly.”

“First you complain that by disguising your identity I misrepresent you and badly distort the reality. You’re a Jew, not an Italian-American. You’re a novelist, not a poet. You came to me at twenty-nine, not at forty. Then in the next breath you complain that I fail to disguise your identity enough-rather, that I have revealed your identity by using this particular incident. This of course is your ambivalence again about your ‘special-ness.

“It is not of course my ambivalence again! You’re confusing the argument again. You’re blurring important distinctions-just as you do in that piece! Let’s at least take up each issue in turn.”

“We have taken up each issue in turn, three and four times over.

“But you still refuse to get it. Even if your article was at the printer, once you had read the Anne Frank story you should have made every effort to protect my privacy-and my trust in you!

“It was impossible.”

“You could have withdrawn the article.”

“You are asking the impossible.”

“What is more important, publishing your article or keeping my trust?”

“Those were not my alternatives.”

“But they were.”

“That is the way you see it. Look here, we are clearly at an impasse, and under these conditions treatment cannot be continued. We can make no progress.”

“But I did not just walk in off the street last week. I am your patient.”

“True. And I cannot be under attack from my patient any longer.”

“Tolerate it,” I said bitterly-a phrase of his that had helped me through some rough days. “Look, given that you must certainly have had an inkling that I might be using that incident in a piece of fiction, since you in fact knew I was working on a story to which that incident was the conclusion, mightn’t you at the very least have thought to ask my permission, ask if it was all right with me…”

“Do you ask permission of the people you write about?”

“But I am not a psychoanalyst! The comparison won’t work. I write fiction-or did, once upon a time. A Jewish Father was not ‘about’ my family, or about Grete and me, as you certainly must realize. It may have originated there, but it was finally a contrivance, an artifice, a rumination on the real. A self-avowed work of imagination, Doctor! I do not write ‘about’ people in a strict factual or historical sense.”

“But then you think,” he said, with a hard look, “that I don’t either.”

“Dr. Spielvogel, please, that is just not a good enough answer. And you must know it. First off, you are bound by ethical considerations that happen not to be the ones that apply to my profession. Nobody comes to me with confidences the way they do to you, and if they tell me stories, it’s not so that I can cure what ails them. That’s obvious enough. It’s in the nature of being a novelist to make private life public-that’s a part of what a novelist is up to. But certainly it is not what I thought you were up to when I came here. I thought your job was to treat me! And second, as to accuracy-you are supposed to be accurate, after all, even if you haven’t been as accurate as I would want you to be in this thing here.”

“Mr. Tarnopol, ‘this thing here’ is a scientific paper. None of us could write such papers, none of us could share our findings with one another, if we had to rely upon the permission or the approval of our patients in order to publish. You are not the only patient who would want to censor out the unpleasant facts or who would find ‘inaccurate’ what he doesn’t like to hear about himself.”

“Oh that won’t wash, and you know it! I’m willing to hear anything about myself-and always have been. My problem, as I see it, isn’t my impenetrability. As a matter of fact, I tend to rise to the bait, Dr. Spielvogel, as Maureen, for one, can testify.”

“Oh, do you? Ironically, it is the narcissistic defenses discussed here that prevent you from accepting the article as something other than an assault upon your dignity or an attempt to embarrass or belittle you. It is precisely the blow to your narcissism that has swollen the issue out of all proportion for you. Simultaneously, you act as though it is about nothing but you, when actually, of the fifteen pages of text, your case takes up barely two. But then you do not like at all the idea of yourself suffering from ‘castration anxiety.’ You do not like the idea of your aggressive fantasies vis-à-vis your mother. You never have. You do not like me to describe your father, and by extension you, his son and heir, as ‘ineffectual’ and ‘submissive,’ although you don’t like when I call you ‘successful’ either. Apparently that tends to dilute a little too much your comforting sense of victimized innocence.”

“Look, I’m sure there are in New York City such people as you’ve just described. Only I ain’t one of ‘em! Either that’s some model you’ve got in your head, some kind of patient for all seasons, or else it’s some other patient of yours you’re thinking about; I don’t know what the hell to make of it, frankly. Maybe what it comes down to is a problem of self-expression; maybe it’s that the writing isn’t very precise.”

“Oh, the writing is also a problem?”

“I don’t like to say it, but maybe writing isn’t your strong point.”

He smiled. “Could it be, in your estimation? Could I be precise enough to please you? I think perhaps what so disturbs you about the incident in the Anne Frank story is not that by using it I may have disclosed your identity, but that in your opinion I plagiarized and abused your material. You are made so very angry by this piece of writing that I have dared to publish. But if I am such a weak and imprecise writer as you suggest, then you should not feel so threatened by my little foray into English prose.”

“I don’t feel ‘threatened.’ Oh, please, don’t argue like Maureen, will you? That is just more of that language again, which doesn’t at all express what you mean and doesn’t get anyone anywhere.”