Philip Roth: My Life As A Man

A book in the Zuckerman series, 1974

The two stories in part I,

“Useful Fictions,” and part II,

the autobiographical narrative

“My True Story,” are drawn from

the writings of Peter Tarnopol.

First, foremost, the puppyish, protected upbringing above his father’s shoe store in Camden. Seventeen years the adored competitor of that striving, hot-headed shoedog (that’s all, he liked to say, a lowly shoedog, but just you wait and see), a man who gave him Dale Carnegie to read so as to temper the boy’s arrogance, and his own example to inspire and strengthen it. “Keep up that cockiness with people, Natie, and you’ll wind up a hermit, a hated person, the enemy of the world-“ Meanwhile, downstairs in his store, Polonius displayed nothing but contempt for any employee whose ambition was less fierce than his own. Mr. Z.-as he was called in the store, and at home by his little son when the youngster was feeling his oats-Mr. Z. expected, demanded., that by the end of the workday his salesmen and his stock boy should each have as stupendous a headache as he did. That the salesmen, upon quitting, invariably announced that they hated his guts, always came to him as a surprise: he expected a young fellow to be grateful to a boss who relentlessly goaded him to increase his commissions. He couldn’t understand why anyone would want less when he could have more, simply, as Mr. Z. put it, “by pushing a little.” And if they wouldn’t push, he would do it for them: “Don’t worry,” he admitted proudly, “I’m not proud,” meaning by that apparently that he had easy access to his wrath when confronted with another’s imperfection.

And that went for his own flesh and blood as well as the hired help. For example, there was the time (and the son would never forget it-in part it may even account for what goaded him to be “a writer”), there was the time the father caught a glimpse of his little Nathan’s signature across the face of a booklet the child had prepared for school, and nearly blew their house down. The nine-year-old had been feeling self-important and the signature showed it. And the father knew it. “This is the way they teach you to sign your name, Natie? This is supposed to be the signature that somebody on the other end is supposed to read and have respect for? Who the hell can read something that looks like a train wreck! Goddam it, boy, this is your name. Sign it right!” The self-important child of the self-important shoedog bawled in his room for hours afterward, all the while strangling his pillow with his bare hands until it was dead. Nonetheless, when he emerged in his pajamas at bedtime, he was holding by its topmost corners a sheet of white paper with the letters of his name, round and legible, engraved in black ink at the center. He handed it over to the tyrant: “Is this okay?” and in the next instant was lifted aloft into the heaven of his father’s bristly evening stubble. “Ah, now that’s a signature! That’s something you can hold your head up about! This I’m going to tack up over the counter in the store!” And he did just that, and then led the customers (most of whom were Negroes) all the way around behind the register, where they could get a really close look at the little boy’s signature. “What do you think of that!” he would ask, as though the name were in fact appended to the Emancipation Proclamation.

And so it went with this bewildering dynamo of a protector. Once when they were out fishing at the seashore, and Nathan’s Uncle Philly had seen fit to give his nephew a good shake for being careless with his hook, the shoedog had threatened to throw Philly over the side of the boat and into the bay for laying a hand on the child. “The only one who touches him is me, Philly!” “Yeah, that’ll be the day…” Philly mumbled. “Touch him again, Philly,” his father said savagely, “and you’ll be talking to the bluefish, I promise you! You’ll be talking to eels!” But then back at the rooming house where the Zuckermans were spending their two-week vacation, Nathan, for the first and only time in his life, was thrashed with a belt for nearly taking his uncle’s eye out while clowning around with that goddam hook. He was astonished that his father’s face, like his own, should be wet with tears when the three-stroke beating was over, and then-more astonishing-he found himself crushed in the man’s embrace. “An eye, Nathan, a person’s eye-do you know what it would be like for a grown man to have to go through life without eyes?”

No, he didn’t; any more than he knew what it would be like to be a small boy without a father, or wanted to know, for all that his ass felt on fire.

Twice his father had gone bankrupt in the years between the wars: Mr. Z.’s men’s wear in the late twenties, Mr. Z.’s kiddies’ wear in the early thirties; and yet never had a child of Z.’s gone without three nourishing meals a day, or without prompt medical attention, or decent clothes, or a clean bed, or a few pennies “allowance” in his pocket. Businesses crumbled, but never the household, because never the head of the house. During those bleak years of scarcity and hardship, little Nathan hadn’t the faintest idea that his family was trembling on the brink of anything but perfect contentment, so convincing was the confidence of that volcanic father.

And the faith of the mother. She certainly didn’t act as though she was married to a businessman who’d been bankrupt and broke two times over. Why, the husband had only to sing a few bars of “The Donkey Serenade” while shaving in the bathroom, for the wife to announce to the children at the breakfast table, “And I thought it was the radio. For a moment I actually thought it was Allan Jones.” If he whistled while washing the car, she praised him over the gifted canaries who whistled popular songs (popular maybe, said Mr. Z., among other canaries) on WEAF Sunday mornings; dancing her across the kitchen linoleum (the waltz spirit oftentimes seized him after dinner) he was “another Fred Astaire”; joking for the children at the dinner table he was, at least to her way of thinking, funnier than anyone on “Can You Top This”-certainly funnier than that Senator Ford. And when he parked the Studebaker-it never failed-she would look out at the distance between the wheels and the curbstone, and announce-it never failed-“Perfect!” as though he had set a sputtering airliner down into a cornfield. Needless to say, never to criticize where you could praise was a principle of hers; as it happened, with Mr. Z. for a husband, she couldn’t have gotten away with anything else had she tried.

Then the just deserts. About the time Sherman, their older son, was coming out of the navy and young Nathan was entering high school, business suddenly began to boom in the Camden store, and by 1949, the year Zuckerman entered college, a brand new “Mr. Z.” shoe store had opened out at the two-million-dollar Country Club Hills Shopping Mall. And then at last the one-family house: ranch style, with a flagstone fireplace, on a one-acre lot-the family dream come true just as the family was falling apart.