The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (24 page)

8. Lastly, what you elicited about men and women. “I sometimes think that men have a root neurosis about women,” Maria told me. “It’s really a sort of suspicion, I wouldn’t lay any money on it, but I think that—forgive the childish nature of this remark—but through reading all kinds of books and through experience, I do feel that men are a bit afraid of women. And that’s why they behave as they do. There are plenty of individuals who are not afraid of individual women, of course, and maybe plenty who are not afraid of women generally. But my experience has been that most of them are.” “Do you think,” I asked her, “that women are afraid of men?” “No,” she said, “not in the same way. I’m actually, as you know, afraid of
people.
But I’m not particularly afraid of men.” “Well, maybe you’re right,” I said, “though ‘afraid’ puts it too strongly.” “Distrustful, then,” Maria said.

When she’d finished reading, I asked the question you’ve asked: should it be published? “If he wants it to be,” she said, “why not?” “Simply because,” I said, “the only person capable of commenting on his life is his imagination. Because the inhibition is just too tremendous in this form. The self-censorship that went on here is sticking out everywhere. He’s not telling the truth about his personal experience. In the mask of Philip he is not capable of doing it. In the mask of Philip he’s too nice. He’s the little boy nuzzling mama’s sealskin coat. It’s no wonder he begins with that.” “As a novelist’s wife who may yet end up as her husband’s subject, I’m not someone who considers niceness on a par with Nazism.” “But it’s surface mining,” I said, “and not much more: in spite of his being very much in control of his defensiveness, the book is fundamentally defensive. Just as having this letter at the end is a self-defensive trick to have it both ways. I’m not even sure any longer which of us he’s set up as the straw man. I thought first it was him in his letter to me—now it feels like me in my letter to him. It’s irrelevant to say I don’t trust him when the maneuvering is the message, I know, but I don’t. Sure, he talks so freely about all his soft spots, but only after choosing awfully carefully which soft spots to talk about.” “Well, take heart,” said Maria, “maybe he’ll begin doing the same for you.” “No, what’s motivating his selectivity is strictly self-interest. No, neither his discretion nor his shame enters into his depiction of
me.
There he is
truly
free. And where you
and
I are concerned, he’s not likely ever to be as gentle and taciturn as he is about May and himself.
That
romance of anthropological contradictions is practically painless, or so he says. Where’s May’s anti-Semitic mother? If she even existed, offstage in Cleveland, bothering no one. Where’s May’s anti-Semitic sister? Nonexistent.” “While mine,” said Maria, able no longer to suppress her anxiety, “mine are virtually around the corner! Mine practically come to bed with us at night! Please, can’t we keep to a theoretical discussion of literature?” “We were. I was pointing to what makes us more interesting than them.” “But I don’t
want
to be interesting! I want to be left alone with the things that are of no great interest at all. Bringing up a child. Not neglecting an aging parent. Staying sane. Uninteresting, unimportant, but
that’s
what it’s all about. I accept that one never gets any more from life than adulterated pleasure, but how much longer are we to be bedeviled by his Jewish fixation! I refuse to allow him to make that into a major problem again! I cannot jump, I
will
not jump, every time the needle moves on his fucking Jewish record! Especially as there is not an ounce of antagonism between you and me, especially as we get on so
well
—except when he starts up with
that!
There were those months after the blowup over my mother when everything seemed to have resolved itself, just a lovely long period of quiet and love. What do confrontations on that subject
achieve?
Who even cares, other than him? I thought your New Year’s resolution was to not make too much of a fuss about that sort of thing. And then comes this beard! Oh, Nathan, do you really think that beard is a good idea? You seem always to feel that you have to explain what nobody is asking you to explain—your right to be, and to be
here.
But no one
needs
that kind of warranty from you. Those are—and don’t go for me when I say this—those are very Jewish feelings and frankly I believe that if it weren’t for him you would not have them. I don’t know—do you think it would help to see someone, sort of a psychiatric sort of person, about this Jewish business? To have spent all of this evening reading this book—and now I feel so defenseless against what I just know is coming!”

And now, alone, in the dark bedroom she lies, terrified that we shall never have the possibility of being other than what you, with your obsessive biography, determine; that never will it be our good fortune, or our child’s, to live like those whose authors naïvely maintain that at a certain point the characters “take over” and do the storytelling themselves on their own initiative. What she’s saying is, “Oh, Christ, here he goes again—he’s going to fuck us up!”

Is Maria right? What
is
coming? Why, in her England,
have
I been given this close-cropped, wirebrush, gray-speckled beard? Is what began inconsequentially enough now to yield consequences that, however ridiculous, will send us reeling again? How can our harmonious contentment last much longer when the household’s future
is
being determined by someone with your penchant for dramatic upheaval? How can we really believe that this beard means nothing when you, who have rabbinically bearded me, appear in even just your first few pages to be more preoccupied than ever in your life with the gulf between gentile and Jew? Must this, my fourth marriage, be torn apart because you, in middle age, have discovered in yourself a passion to be reconciled with the tribe? Why should your relentless assessing of Jewish predicaments be
our
cross to bear!

Who are we, anyway? And why? Your autobiography doesn’t tell us anything of what has happened, in your life, that has brought
us
out of you. There is an enormous silence about all that. I still realize that the subject here is how the writer came into being, but, from my point of view, it would be more interesting to know what has happened since that has ended up in your writing about me and Maria. What’s the relation between this fiction and your present factuality? We just have to guess that, if we can. What am I doing exiled in this London house with a wife who wants no disturbance in her peaceful life? How much peace am I made for? Her haircuts, the nanny, the clothes dryer—how much more of that intense and orderly domesticity that I once craved can I afford to take? She is indeed making me a “beautiful” existence for the first time in my life, she is an expert in the quiet and civilized and pleasant ways of being, in the quiet and muted life, but what will that make of me and my work? Are you suggesting that without the fights, without the anger, without the conflicts and ferocity, life is incredibly boring, that there is no alternative to the fanatic obsession that can make a writer of a person except these nice dinners where you talk over candlelight and a good bottle of wine about the nanny and the haircut? Is the beard meant to represent a protest against the pallidness of all this—this randomness? Yet suppose the protest bizarrely evolves into a shattering conflict? I’ll be miserable!

Well, there it is. Or there it isn’t. I will let this outburst stand, absurd as I know it must be to expect even my most emotional plea to alter the imaginative course so long ago laid down for you. Similarly, I will not go back and alter what I argued earlier—that your talent for self-confrontation is best served by sticking with me—however much that argument, if persuasive to you, virtually guarantees the unfolding of the worst of our fears. Nobody who wishes to be worthy of serious consideration as a literary character can possibly expect an author to heed a cry for exceptional treatment. An implausible solution to an intractable conflict would compromise my integrity no less than yours. But surely a self-conscious author like you must question, nonetheless, whether a character struggling interminably with what appears to be the necessary drama of his existence is not, in fact, being gratuitously and cruelly victimized by the enactment, on the part of the author, of a neurotic ritual. All I can ask is that you keep this in mind when it is time for me to shave tomorrow morning.

Obligingly yours,

Zuckerman

P.S. I have said nothing about your crack-up. Of course I am distressed to hear that in the spring of 1987 what was to have been minor surgery turned into a prolonged physical ordeal that led to a depression that carried you to the edge of emotional and mental dissolution. But I readily admit that I am distressed as much for me and my future with Maria as for you. This now
too
? Having argued thoroughly against my extinction, in some eight thousand carefully chosen words, I seem only to have guaranteed myself a new round of real agony! But what’s the alternative?

BOOKS BY PHILIP ROTH

Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

Letting Go (1962)

When She Was Good (1967)

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)

Our Gang (1971)

The Breast (1972)

The Great American Novel (1973)

My Life as a Man (1974)

Reading Myself and Others (1975)

The Professor of Desire (1977)

The Ghost Writer (1979)

A Philip Roth Reader (1980)

Zuckerman Unbound (1981)

The Anatomy Lesson (1983)

Zuckerman Bound (1985)

The Counterlife (1987)

The Facts (1988)

Copyright
©
1988 by Philip Roth

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roth, Philip.

The facts : a novelist’s autobiography / Philip Roth. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Roth, Philip—Biography. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

PS3568.O855Z467  1988  813'.54—dc19 [B]  88-14187

Sections of this book first appeared, in slightly different form, in the
Atlantic,
the
New York Times Book Review,
and
Vanity Fair

eISBN 9781466846425

First eBook edition: June 2013