Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

What had happened was this:

In the aftermath of minor knee surgery, my pain, instead of diminishing as the weeks passed, got worse and worse, far exceeding the prolonged discomfort that had prompted me to decide on surgery in the first place. When I went to see my young surgeon about the worsening condition, he merely said, “This happens sometimes,” and, claiming to have warned me beforehand that the operation might not work, dismissed me as his patient. I was left with only some pills to mitigate my astonishment and manage the pain. Such a surprising outcome from a brief outpatient procedure might have made anyone angry and despondent; what happened in my case was worse.

My mind began to disintegrate. The word DISINTEGRATION seemed itself to be the matter out of which my brain was constituted, and it began spontaneously coming apart. The fourteen letters, big, chunky, irregularly sized components of my brain, elaborately intertwined, tore jaggedly loose from one another, sometimes a fragment of a letter at a time, but usually in painfully unpronounceable nonsyllabic segments of two or three, their edges roughly serrated. This mental coming apart was as distinctly physical a reality as a tooth being pulled, and the agony of it was excruciating.

Hallucinations like these and worse stampeded through me day and night, a herd of wild animals I could do nothing to stop. I couldn’t stop anything, my will blotted out by the magnitude of the tiniest, most idiotic thought. Two, three, four times a day, without provocation or warning, I’d begin to cry. It didn’t matter if I was alone in my studio, turning the page of yet another book that I couldn’t read, or at dinner with Claire, looking hopelessly at the food she’d prepared that I couldn’t find any reason to eat — I cried. I cried before friends, before strangers; even sitting alone on the toilet I would dissolve, wring myself dry with tears, an outpouring of tears that left me feeling absolutely raw — shorn by tears of five decades of living, my inmost being lay revealed to everyone in all its sickly puniness.

I could not forget my shirtsleeves for two minutes at a time. I couldn’t seem to prevent myself from feverishly rolling up my shirtsleeves and then rolling them down just as feverishly and meticulously buttoning the cuff, only immediately to unbutton the cuff and begin the meaningless procedure once more, as though its meaning went, in fact, to the core of my existence. I couldn’t stop flinging open the windows and then, when my claustrophobic fit had given way to chills, banging them shut as though it were not I but someone else who had flung them all open. My pulse rate would shoot up to 120 beats a minute even while I sat, brain-dead, in front of the nightly TV news, a corpse but for a violently thumping heart that had taken to keeping time to a clock ticking twice as fast as any on earth. That was another manifestation of the panic that I could do nothing to control: panic sporadically throughout the day and then without letup, titanically, at night.

I dreaded the hours of darkness. Climbing the obstacle course of stairs to our bedroom one painful step at a time — bending the good leg, dragging the bad leg — I felt myself on the way to a torture session that this time I couldn’t survive. My only chance of getting through to daylight without having my mind come completely apart was to hook hold of a talismanic image out of my most innocent past and try to ride out the menace of the long night lashed to the mast of that recollection. One that I worked hysterically hard, in a kind of convulsion of yearning, to summon forth to save me was of my older brother guiding me along our street of rooming houses and summer cottages to the boardwalk and down the flight of wooden steps to the beach at the Jersey shore town where our family rented a room for a month each summer. Take me, Sandy, please . When I thought (oftentimes mistakenly) that Claire was asleep, I would chant this incantation aloud, four childish words that I had not uttered so passionately, if ever at all, since 1938, when I was five and my attentive, protective brother was ten.

I wouldn’t let Claire draw the shades at night, because I had to know the sun was rising the very second that sunrise began; but each morning, when the panes began to lighten in the east-facing windows just to the side of where I lay, whatever relief I felt from my terror of the night that had just ended was copiously displaced by my terror of the day about to begin. Night was interminable and unbearable, day was interminable and unbearable, and when I reached into my pillbox for the capsule that was supposed to carve a little hole where I could hide for a few hours from all the pain that was stalking me, I couldn’t believe (though I had no choice but to believe) that the fingers trembling in the pillbox were mine. “Where’s Philip?” I said hollowly to Claire while I stood gripping her hand at the edge of the pool. For summers on end I had swum regularly in this pool for thirty minutes at the end of each day; now I was fearful of even putting in a toe, overwhelmed by the pretty, summery surface sheen of those thousands of gallons of water in which I was sure to be sucked under for good. “Where is Philip Roth?” I asked aloud. “Where did he go?” I was not speaking histrionically. I asked because I wanted to know.

This and more like it lasted one hundred days and one hundred nights. If anyone had telephoned then to say that Philip Roth had been spotted at a war-crimes trial in Jerusalem or was advertised in the Jerusalem paper as lecturing at the King David Hotel on the only solution to the Jewish problem, I can’t imagine what I would have done. As thoroughly enveloped as I was in the disaster of self-abandonment, it might have furnished corroboratory evidence just unhinging enough to convince me to go ahead and commit suicide. Because I thought about killing myself all the time. Usually I thought of drowning: in the little pond across the road from the house … if I weren’t so horrified of the water snakes there nibbling at my corpse; in the picturesque big lake only a few miles away … if I weren’t so frightened of driving out there alone. When we came to New York that May for me to receive an honorary degree from Columbia, I opened the window of our fourteenth-floor hotel room after Claire had momentarily gone downstairs to the drugstore and, leaning as far out over the interior courtyard as I could while still holding tight to the sill, I told myself, “Do it. No snakes to stop you now.” But there was my father to stop me now; he was coming from New Jersey the next day to see me get my degree. Jokingly on the phone he’d taken to calling me “Doctor,” just as he’d done on the previous occasions when I was about to receive one of these things. I’d wait to jump until after he went home.

At Columbia, facing from the platform the several thousand people gathered festively together in the big sunny library plaza to watch the commencement exercises, I was convinced that I couldn’t make it through the afternoon-long ceremony without beginning either to scream aloud or to sob uncontrollably. I’ll never know how I got through that day or through the dinner welcoming the honorary-degree candidates the evening before without letting on to everybody who saw me that I was a man who was finished and about to prove it. Nor will I ever know what I might have gone ahead to do halfway out the hotel window that morning or even on the platform the next day, had I not been able to interpose between my denuded self and its clamorous longing for obliteration the devotion linking me to an eighty-six-year-old father whose life my death by suicide would smash to smithereens.

After the ceremony at Columbia, my father came back to the hotel with us for a cup of coffee. He’d surmised weeks before that something was critically wrong even though I insisted, when we saw each other or spoke on the phone, that it was only the persistence of the physical pain that was getting me down. “You look drained,” he said, “you look awful.” How I looked had made his own face go ashen — and he was as yet suffering from no fatal disease, as far as anyone knew. “Knee,” I replied. “Hurts.” And said no more. “This isn’t like you, Phil, you take everything in your stride.” I smiled. “I do?” “Here,” he said, “open it when you get home,” and he handed me a package that I could tell he had encased himself in its bulky brown-paper wrapping. He said, “To go with your new degree, Doctor.”