The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (14 page)

I don’t intend to suggest that my sentimental fondness for Tompkins Square Park should have given Josie pause and sent her instead to look for her pregnant woman in Washington Square Park, only a ten-minute walk from my apartment in the other direction. To the contrary, had she gone anywhere
other
than Tompkins Square Park, she wouldn’t have been the woman whose imagination’s claim on my own may well have been what accounted for her inexplicable power over a supremely independent, self-assured, and enterprising young man, a stalwart competitor with a stubborn sense of determination and a strong desire to have his own way. The same deluded audacity that made even the least dramatic encounter promising, that had prompted her, probably quite spontaneously, to sign herself into the Chicago hospital as Jewish a mere hundred days into our affair, that had inspired her to hand over to my conventional, utterly respectable mother the dirty underthings that she’d accumulated on her holiday with me, was precisely what pointed her, like a hound dog with the sharpest nose for acerbic irony, to Tompkins Square Park in order to make a responsible man of me—to make a responsible
Jew
of me: to Tompkins Square Park, where she knew I so enjoyed my solitude and my pleasant sense of identification with my Americanized family’s immigrant origins.

And a few days later, when she’d accepted my proposal to marry her—on the condition that before the marriage she have an abortion—it was the same instinct that led her to take the three hundred dollars I’d withdrawn from the bank and, instead of going with it to the abortionist whose name I had got from an intern friend, pocket the cash and spend the day in a movie theater in Times Square, repeatedly watching Susan Hayward go to the gas chamber in
I Want to Live!

Yet once she’d “had” her abortion—after she’d come back from the movies to my basement apartment and, in tears, shivering uncontrollably, had told me from beneath the blankets on the bed all the horrible medical details of the humiliating procedure to which I had subjected her—why didn’t I pick up
then
and run away, a free man? How could I
still
have stayed with her? The question really is how could I resist her. Look, how could I ever have resisted her? Forget the promise I’d made, after receiving the rabbit-test results, to make her my wife if only she got rid of the fetus—how could I be anything
but
mesmerized by this overbrimming talent for brazen self-invention, how could a half-formed, fledgling novelist hope ever to detach himself from this undiscourageable imagination unashamedly concocting the most diabolical ironies? It wasn’t only she who wanted to be indissolubly joined to my authorship and my book but I who could not separate myself from hers.

I Want to Live!,
a melodrama about a California B-girl who is framed for murder and goes to the gas chamber. The movie she went to see (instead of the abortionist, for whom she had no need) is also to be found in
My Life as a Man.
Why should I have tried to make up anything better? How could I? And for all I knew, Josie had herself made that up right on the spot, consulted her muse and blurted it out to me on the afternoon of her confession two years later … even, perhaps, as she invented on the spot—both to make her story more compelling and to torture me a little more—the urine specimen that she’d bought from the black woman in Tompkins Square Park. Maybe she did these things and maybe she didn’t; she certainly did
something
—but who can distinguish what is so from what isn’t so when confronted with a master of fabrication? The wanton scenes she improvised! The sheer hyperbole of what she imagined! The self-certainty unleashed by her own deceit! The conviction behind those caricatures!

It’s no use pretending I didn’t have a hand in nurturing this talent. What may have begun as little more than a mendacious, provincial mentality tempted to ensnare a good catch was transformed, not by the weakness but by the strength of my resistance, into something marvelous and crazy, a bedazzling lunatic imagination that—everything else aside—rendered absolutely ridiculous my conventional university conceptions of fictional probability and all those elegant, Jamesian formulations I’d imbibed about proportion and indirection and tact. It took time and it took blood, and not, really, until I began
Portnoy’s Complaint
would I be able to cut loose with anything approaching her gift for flabbergasting boldness. Without doubt she was my worst enemy ever, but, alas, she was also nothing less than the greatest creative-writing teacher of them all, specialist par excellence in the aesthetics of extremist fiction.

Reader, I married her.

All in the Family

I still don’t think it was innocent of me to have been as astonished as I was at twenty-six when I found myself up against the most antagonistic social opposition of my life, and not from gentiles at one or the other end of the class spectrum but from angry middle-class and establishment Jews, and a number of eminent rabbis, accusing me of being anti-Semitic and self-hating. I hadn’t begun to foresee this as a part of the struggle to write, and yet it was to be central to it.

As intellectually sophisticated as I was, “self-hatred” was still a new idea to me then; if the phenomenon had ever been present in my world, I had certainly never perceived it as a problem. In Newark, I hadn’t known anyone to whose conduct self-hatred was anything like the key, and the Bucknell chapter of Sigma Alpha Mu, whatever its shortcomings, never seemed to chafe under its distinctive identity or noticeably to apologize for itself. When Moe Finkelstein, one of the Sammies’ two varsity football players, entered the game for Bucknell, his fraternity brothers invariably sent up a whoop signaling their proud affiliation, a demonstration of feeling that would have driven a self-hating Jew into paroxysms of shame. In fact, what was most admirable about the Sammies was the easygoing way in which they synthesized themselves into a manifestly gentile environment without denying their difference or combatively insisting on it. Theirs seemed to me, even then, a graceful response to a social situation that did not always bring out the best in people, particularly in that conformist era.

And virtually from the day that I arrived in Hyde Park as a graduate student and rented a tiny room in International House, the University of Chicago looked to me like some highly evolved, utopian extension of the Jewish world of my origins, as though the solidarity and intimate intensity of my old neighborhood life had been infused with a lifesaving appetite for intellectual amusement and experimentation. When I began graduate school in September 1954, the university seemed to me full of unmistakably Jewish Jews far
less
self-conscious and uncertain about themselves, really, than the Irish Catholics from Minnesota and the Baptists from Kansas—Jews wholly secularized but hardly chagrined by a pedigree from which they seemed to derive their undisguised contentiousness, their excitability, and a gift for satiric irony whose flavor I recognized immediately: our family friend Mickey Pasteelnik, Newark’s Apple King, had he enjoyed a literary education, would surely have talked about
The Wings of the Dove
very much like my ebullient fellow student from Brooklyn, Arthur Geffin. Ted Solotaroff—with whom I profitably debated for years after I returned from the Army in 1956 and entered the Chicago Ph.D. program—remembers us referring to Isabel Archer as a “shiksa.” I recall another conversation, over beer at the University Tavern, where Geffin tended bar at night, in which much scrupulosity was expended determining if Osmond wasn’t really a Jew.

This was of course so much off-hours kibitzing, but the pleasure that we took in bringing to
The Portrait of a Lady
what we’d imbibed eavesdropping on our fathers’ pinochle games does suggest something about the playful confidence we had in our Jewishness as an intellectual resource. It was also a defense against overrefinement, a counterweight to the intimidating power of Henry James and literary good taste generally, whose “civilizing” function was variously tempting to clever, ambitious city boys who knew just how casually coarse they could become on a street corner or at a poker game or in the upper deck at Ebbets Field. It seemed less advisable to treat this strain of vulgarity—which we had come to by being both our fathers’ sons and our neighborhoods’ creatures—as an impurity to be purged from our speech than to own up to it matter-of-factly, ironically, unashamedly, and to take a real, pleasurable satisfaction in what more than likely would have seemed to Henry James to be our unadventitious origins.

What ignited the Jewish charges against me was the publication in the
New Yorker,
in April 1959, of “Defender of the Faith,” a story about some Jewish recruits in the wartime Army trying to extract favors from their reluctant Jewish sergeant. It was my second piece of fiction to appear in a large commercial magazine. With the $800 I’d earned from the first story, in
Esquire,
and an advance from Houghton Mifflin, I’d quit my instructorship at Chicago—and stepped for good (I thought) out of Josie’s life. Intending to live only as a writer, I had moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to that two-room basement apartment that was placed perfectly—given my taste then for urban color—between the bums panhandling on the Bowery and the baskets of bialys on the tables at Ratners. The other stories about Jews that were to be published in the Houghton Mifflin collection,
Goodbye, Columbus,
though they may have attracted a little more than ordinary reader interest, had caused no furor among Jews, appearing as they did in the
Paris Review,
a young literary quarterly then with only a tiny circulation, and in
Commentary,
the monthly edited for years by Elliot Cohen and published by the American Jewish Committee. Had I submitted “Defender of the Faith” to
Commentary
—whose coeditor at that time, Martin Greenberg, was an early supporter and sympathetic friend—I suspect that the magazine would have published it and that the criticism the story aroused there would have been relatively unspectacular. It’s even possible that the ferment inspired a month later by the publication of
Goodbye, Columbus
—the pulpit sermons, the household arguments, the discussions within Jewish organizations gauging my danger, all of which unexpectedly dramatized to people who were essentially nonreaders what was, after all, only a first book of short stories—might never have reached troublesome proportions had “Defender of the Faith” been certified as permissible Jewish discourse by appearing in
Commentary.
And had that happened—had there not been the inflammatory fanfare of the
New Yorker
exposure, had
Goodbye, Columbus
had the innocuous cultural fate of a minor critical success—it’s likely that my alleged anti-Semitism might never have come to pervade the discussion of my work, stimulating me to defend myself in essays and public addresses and, when I decided to take things more aggressively in hand, to strike back at accusations that I had divulged Jewish secrets and vulgarly falsified Jewish lives by upping the ante in
Portnoy’s Complaint. That
was not mistaken for a conciliatory act, and the ramifications of the uproar it fomented eventually inspired me to crystallize the public feud into the drama of internal family dissension that’s the backbone of the Zuckerman series, which began to take shape some eight years later.

That the
New Yorker,
like
Partisan Review
and
Commentary,
had a Jewish editor, William Shawn, Jewish contributors—like S. J. Perelman, Irwin Shaw, Arthur Kober, and J. D. Salinger—and a sizable Jewish readership would only have suggested, to those I’d incensed, that identifying with the
New Yorker’s
privileged, unequivocally non-Jewish aura furnished these Jews (as undoubtedly it did Roth himself) with far more sustenance than they derived from their Jewish status. I soon understood self-hatred to mean an internalized, though not necessarily conscious, loathing of one’s recognizable group markings that culminates either in quasi-pathological efforts to expunge them or in the vicious disparagement of those who don’t even know enough to try.

Because I didn’t have the patience to wait for the author’s copies to reach me by mail, the day that the
New Yorker
was scheduled to appear I made three trips to Fourteenth Street, to the newsstand across from Klein’s, to see if the issue was in yet. When the magazine finally appeared that afternoon, I bought a copy for myself and another to send off to my parents. While I was at college, they had moved from the Weequahic neighborhood to a small garden apartment in a pleasant little complex in nearby Elizabeth, on the very street where they had been married in 1926 and where nearly every Sunday of my childhood, after visiting my widowed paternal grandmother in one of Newark’s oldest immigrant neighborhoods, we would drive over to see my widowed maternal grandmother, who shared a small apartment there with my maiden aunt. The
New Yorker
was really no more familiar to my parents than were the other magazines in which my first stories had begun to appear.
Hygeia
had sometimes come to the house, sporadically we had received
Collier’s, Liberty,
and the
Saturday Evening Post,
but the magazines to which my mother was most faithful were
Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook,
and
Woman’s Home Companion.
In their pages she confirmed her sense of how to dress and to furnish a house, found the recipes that she clipped and filed in her recipe box, and received instruction in the current conventions of child rearing and marriage. Decorum and courtesy meant no less to her than they did to the heroines of the fiction she read in those magazines, and through her genteel example, my brother and I became well-mannered boys, always a source of pride to her, she said, on special Sunday outings to the Tavern, a family restaurant favored by Newark’s Jewish bourgeoisie (a class in which we, who had neither money, property, nor very much social self-assurance, had really only half a foothold).