Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

Coarse, childish, ignorant, utterly lacking in that exquisiteness of feeling and refinement of spirit that he had come to admire so in the novels-in the person-of Virginia Woolf, whose photograph had been tacked above his desk during his last semester at Bass. He entered the army after their feverish, daredevil month together secretly relieved at having left behind him (seemingly as he had found her) Al and Minna’s five-foot nine-inch baby girl; she was a tantalizing slave and an extraordinary lay, but hardly a soul mate for someone who felt as he did about great writers and great books. Or so it seemed, until that day they issued him his Mi rifle, and he found he needed everyone he had.

“I love your prick,” the girl wept into the phone. “I miss your prick so much. Oh, Nathan, I’m touching my cunt, I’m touching my cunt and making believe it’s you. Oh, Nathan, should I make myself come on the phone? Nathan-?”

In tears, in terror, he went reeling from the phone booth: think of it, both he and his genitals would shortly be extinct! Oh what if just the genitals went, and he lived on-suppose a land mine were to explode beneath his boots, and he was returned to a girl like Sharon Shatzky, a blank between the legs. “No!” he told himself. “Stop having such thoughts! Lay off! Use your brains! That is only irrational guilt over Sharon and the zucchini -it is only fear of punishment for buggering the daughter right under the father’s nose! Casebook fantasies of retribution! No such thing can happen!” To him, was what he meant, because of course in warfare such things do happen, they happen every day.

And then, after the eight weeks of infantry training followed by eight more at MP school, he was assigned as a clerk-typist to a quartermaster unit at Fort Campbell, in the southwestern corner of Kentucky, sixty miles east of Paducah, eight thousand east of the land mines. Lucky Zuckerman! Beneficiary of one of those administrative errors by which doomed men are suddenly pardoned, and the happy-go-lucky are, overnight, earmarked for death. These things also happen every day.

Zuckerman could type only with his index fingers, and he knew nothing about filing or making out forms, but fortunately for him, the captain in charge of the supply room to which he was assigned was so pleased to have a Jew around to bait-and that too has been known to happen-that he was willing to make do with an inept assistant. He did not-as the inept assistant continuously feared he would-report the error in classification that had sent Zuckerman to Fort Campbell instead of to his bloody demise in the mud behind a brothel in Seoul, nor did he request a replacement for him from personnel. Instead, each afternoon before departing for the links over by the air base, Captain Clark would tune up for his game by driving cotton golf balls out of his office in the direction of the cubicle occupied by the clerk-typist manqué. Zuckerman did his best to look unperturbed when the golf balls glanced off his shirt. “On target, sir,” said he with a smile. “Not kwat,” replied his superior, all concentration, “not kwat…” and would continue to swat them out through the open door of his office until at last he’d found the mark. “Ah, they we go, Zuckuhmun, rat on the nose.”

Sadistic bully! Southern bigot! Zuckerman left the supply room at the end of each day bound for the office of the adjutant general, where he intended to bring charges against Captain Clark (who, for all he knew, held secret membership in the KKK). But since actually Zuckerman was not even supposed to be in Kentucky, but had been allocated for destruction in Korea (and might wind up there yet, if he gave Clark any trouble), he invariably saw fit to suppress his indignation and proceed on over to the mess hall for dinner, and then on to the post library, to continue to read his way through the Bloomsbury group, with time out every hour or so for another look at the day’s bawdy letter from the teenage debauchee he hadn’t been able to bring himself to relinquish quite yet. But, oh Christ, was he mad! His human dignity! His human rights! His religion! Oh, each time a golf ball caromed softly off his flesh, how he seethed with indignation…which isn’t, however (as Private Zuckerman well knew), the same as running with blood. Nor is it what is meant in literature, or even in life for that matter, by suffering or pain.

Though pain would come to Zuckerman in time-in the form of estrangement, mortification, fierce and unremitting opposition, antagonists who were not respectable deans or loving fathers or dimwitted officers in the Army Quartermaster Corps; oh yes, pain would enter his life soon enough, and not entirely without invitation. As the loving father had warned him, looking for trouble, he would find it-and what a surprise that would be. For in severity and duration, in sheer painfulness, it would be like nothing he had known at home, in school, or in the service, nor would it be like anything he had imagined while contemplating the harrowed, soulful face of Virginia Woolf, or while writing his A+ honors paper on the undercurrent of agony in her novels. Only a short time after having been shipped by providential error-his last big dose, as it turned out, of beginner’s luck-to the rural American southland instead of the Korean slaughter, adversity was to catch up with the young conquistador. He would begin to pay…for the vanity and the ignorance, to be sure, but above all for the contradictions: the stinging tongue and the tender hide, the spiritual aspirations and the lewd desires, the softy boyish needs and the manly, the magisterial ambitions. Yes, over the next decade of his life he was to learn all that his father might have wished Dale Carnegie to teach him about humility, and then some. And then some more.

But that is another story, and one whose luridness makes the small-time southern Jew-baiter lofting cotton golf balls toward his nose, makes even seventeen-year-old Sharon Shatzky, performing for him on a gourd like a Pigalle whore at an exhibition, seem as much a part of his idyllic and innocent youth as that afternoon he once spent sipping tea and eating watercress in Caroline Benson’s garden. The story of Zuckerman’s suffering calls for an approach far more serious than that which seems appropriate to the tale of his easeful salad days. To narrate with fidelity the misfortunes of Zuckerman’s twenties would require deeper dredging, a darker sense of irony, a grave and pensive voice to replace the amused, Olympian point of view…or maybe what that story requires is neither gravity nor complexity, but just another author, someone who would see it too for the simple five-thousand-word comedy that it very well may have been. 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” because he wonders if that isn’t more the measure of the man than of the misfortune.

No, I did not marry for conventional reasons; no one can accuse me of that. It was not for fear of loneliness that I chose my wife, or to have “a helpmate,” or a cook, or a companion in my old age, and it certainly was not out of lust. No matter what they may say about me now, sexual desire had nothing to do with it. To the contrary: though she was a pretty enough woman-square, strong Nordic head; resolute blue eyes that I thought of admiringly as “wintry”; straight wheat-colored hair worn in bangs; a handsome smile; an appealing, openhearted laugh-her short, heavy-legged body struck me as very nearly dwarfish in its proportions and was, from first to last, unremittingly distasteful. Her gait in particular displeased me: mannish, awkward, it took on a kind of rolling quality when she tried to move quickly, and in my mind associated with images of cowhands and merchant seamen. Watching her run to meet me on some Chicago street-after we had become lovers-I would positively recoil, even at a distance, at the prospect of holding that body against me, at the idea that voluntarily I had made her mine.