The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (16 page)

I saw in her desire to be some sort of simulated Jew yet another distressing collapse of integrity; something very like the self-hatred with which I had been stigmatized seemed to impel her drive to camouflage the markings of her own small-town, Middle Western past by falsifying again her affiliation with me and my background. I introduce this story not so as to have one more go at Josie but to reveal a bizarre irony of which I was not unconscious while the spanking-new Jew of unmistakable Nordic appearance sat in the Yeshiva audience looking on at the “excommunication” of the Semitic-featured young writer whose seventeen years as his parents’ child in the Weequahic neighborhood couldn’t have left him more inextinguishably Jewish.

The trial (in every sense) began after di Donato, Ellison, and I had each delivered twenty-minute introductory statements. Ellison rambled on easily and intelligently from a few notes, di Donato winged it not very logically, and I read from some prepared pages, thus allowing me to speak confidently while guarding, I thought, against an interrogator’s altering the context in which my argument was being made; I was determined to take every precaution against being misunderstood. When the moderator began the second stage of the symposium by questioning us about our opening statements, the only panelist he seemed truly interested in was me. His first question, following di Donato’s monologue—which would have seemed, had I been moderating, to require rigorous clarification—was this: “Mr. Roth, would you write the same stories you’ve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?”—a question that was to turn up some twenty years later in
The Ghost Writer,
asked of Nathan Zuckerman by Judge Leopold Wapter.

Thirty minutes later, I was still being grilled. No response I gave was satisfactory and, when the audience was allowed to take up the challenge, I realized that I was not just opposed but hated. I’ve never forgotten my addled reaction: an undertow of bodily fatigue took hold and began sweeping me away from that auditorium even as I tried to reply coherently to one denunciation after another (for we had by then proceeded beyond interrogation to anathema). My combative instinct, which was not undeveloped, simply withered away and I had actually to suppress a desire to close my eyes and, in my chair at the panelists’ table, with an open microphone only inches from my perspiring face, drift into unconsciousness. Ralph Ellison must have noticed my tenacity fading because all at once I heard him defending me with an eloquent authority that I could never have hoped to muster from halfway out to oblivion. His intellectual position was virtually identical to mine, but he was presenting it as a black American, instructing through examples drawn from
Invisible Man
and the ambiguous relationship that novel had established with some vocal members of his own race. His remarks seemed to appear to the audience far more creditable than mine or perhaps situated the audience so far from its real mission as to deflate or deflect the inquisitorial pressure that I had envisioned mounting toward a finale that would find me either stoned to death or fast asleep.

With me relegated pretty much to the sidelines, the evening shortly came to an end. From the moderator there were genial good wishes for the panelists, from the spectators there was some scattered applause, and then we all started down off the stage by the side stairs leading into the house. I was immediately surrounded by the element in the audience most antagonistic to my work, whom Ellison’s intercession had clearly curtailed only temporarily. The climax of the tribunal was upon me, and though I was now wide awake, I still couldn’t extricate myself that easily from their midst. Standing in the well between the hall and the stage, with Joe and Josie visible beyond the faces of my jury—though in no conceivable way my Jewry—I listened to the final verdict against me, as harsh a judgment as I ever hope to hear in this or any other world. I only began to shout “Clear away, step back—I’m getting out of here” after somebody, shaking a fist in my face, began to holler, “You were brought up on anti-Semitic literature!” “Yes,” I hollered back, “and what is that?”—curious really to know what he meant. “English literature!” he cried. “English literature is anti-Semitic literature!”

In midtown Manhattan later, Josie, Joe, and I went to have something to eat at the Stage Delicatessen, down the street from the hotel where we were staying. I was angry at what I had stupidly let myself in for, I was wretchedly ashamed of my performance, and I was infuriated still by the accusations from the floor. Over my pastrami sandwich no less, I said, “I’ll never write about Jews again.” Equally ridiculously, I thought that I meant it, or at least that I should. I couldn’t see then, fresh from the event, that the most bruising public exchange of my life constituted not the end of my imagination’s involvement with the Jews, let alone an excommunication, but the real beginning of my thralldom. I had assumed—mostly from the evidence of
Letting Go
—that I had passed beyond the concerns of my collection of apprentice stories and the subjects that had fallen so naturally to me as a beginning writer.
Letting Go,
about the unanticipated responsibilities of young adulthood far from Jewish New Jersey, seemed to foreshadow the direction in which new preoccupations would now guide me. But the Yeshiva battle, instead of putting me off Jewish fictional subjects for good, demonstrated as nothing had before the full force of aggressive rage that made the issue of Jewish self-definition and Jewish allegiance so inflammatory. This group whose embrace once had offered me so much security was itself fanatically insecure. How could I conclude otherwise when I was told that every word I wrote was a disgrace, potentially endangering every Jew? Fanatical security, fanatical insecurity—nothing in my entire background could exemplify better than that night did how deeply rooted the Jewish drama was in this duality.

After an experience like mine at Yeshiva, a writer would have had to be no writer at all to go looking elsewhere for something to write about. My humiliation before the Yeshiva belligerents—indeed, the angry Jewish resistance that I aroused virtually from the start—was the luckiest break I could have had. I was branded.

Now Vee May Perhaps to Begin

The summer house that May Aldridge and I rented was on a quiet blacktop road in the center of Martha’s Vineyard, a few minutes’ walk from the general store in West Tisbury. It was a small, undistinguished house, comfortable enough, though with the exception of the double bed furnished almost exclusively with faded old beach chairs. The windows were bare when we moved up from New York in late June of 1967, and May drove to the cut-rate store in Vineyard Haven and bought fabric to make curtains. An independent woman of thirty-four whose substantial income derived from a family trust fund, she really didn’t have to sit down and sew curtains together out of inexpensive yard goods in order to make ends meet; but at the time I was hardly rich, and we were sharing the house on the assumption that we’d live in it as though we were two people with the same modest means. May managed this simply enough, not only because of her accommodating character (or because we were in love), but because the challenge of her adult life had been to loosen the inhibiting bond between herself and the manner to which she’d been born, in which she was rooted, and by which she’d been left distressingly vulnerable, with too little confidence in her good, clear mind, and unable to animate in a sustained way the passionately felt side of an obliging nature.

May was a gentile woman at the other end of the American spectrum from Josie. She had been sent off to the best schools by an old-line Cleveland paint-manufacturing family that had achieved enormous financial success, as well as the civic distinction and social prominence that once came automatically to American industrial clans of British stock. Fair and green-eyed and slender, she was the loveliest-looking woman I’d ever known, her beauty as delicate as Josie’s attractiveness, when we’d first met, was stolidly earthbound. It was an appearance as indelibly stamped by privilege as Josie’s had been by her provincial small town. The two women were drastically different physical types from social backgrounds that couldn’t have been much more dissimilar and, as women, so unlike as to seem like representatives of divergent genders. In each, inborn character proclivities appeared to have been carried to a stereotypical extreme by something innately disabling in their social origins, so that where Josie, the daughter of a working-class loser, was blunt, scrappy, dissatisfied, envious, resentful, and schemingly opportunistic, May for many years had camouflaged her uncertainties behind a finishing-school facade of nearly self-suffocating decorum. What they shared were the scars of wounds inflicted by the social mentality governing their upbringing; what had drawn me to them (and, more than likely, them to me) was not that they were members in good standing of their respective bloodlines, solidly entrenched in the world of their fathers, but that they were intriguingly estranged from the very strata of American society of which they were each such distinctively emblazoned offspring.

During our five years together, May never once suggested that we go out to Cleveland to meet her family, and when her mother visited her every few months in New York, instead of following our usual routine of my joining May for the evening and sleeping overnight at her East Seventy-eighth Street apartment, I would stay at my own place in Kips Bay, which I’d come to use—on the days when I wasn’t away teaching university classes in Philadelphia or Stony Brook—as little more than a writing studio. Of course we understood that it wasn’t just our unmarried state but also my being a Jew that had something to do with why meeting her parents was probably just as well avoided. Neither of us expected anything horrendous to result from the encounter—we simply didn’t see any reason, so long as we
were
single, to create unnecessary tensions with a family living hundreds of miles away, who themselves seemed more than willing to steer clear of their daughter’s intimate life. My curiosity about May’s Cleveland background couldn’t begin to match my desire to keep the affair from becoming entangled with family concerns; I’d had enough of that.

I did invite my own parents over from New Jersey one evening to have a drink at May’s apartment and to go out with us for dinner. I wanted them to witness how, with May, my life had been restored and simplified; though they’d never known exactly how lurid my marriage had been, they’d had plenty of intimations, had seen the toll it had taken on me, and, as a result, had suffered terribly. My mother, who was so reassured by good manners and herself socially so proper, found May’s graciousness tremendously appealing and would have been only too happy if, on the spot, May could have magically replaced Josie, to whom it seemed I’d been eternally bonded by the State of New York. Though my father also happened to like May, I think he would have been relieved had I taken up with a kangaroo. After my separation from Josie in 1962, she had traveled down to his office in south Jersey and, in lieu of the alimony payments that she claimed I was failing to make, demanded money from him. When my father told her, correctly, that I
was
meeting my legal obligations, she berated
him
for
his
irresponsibility.

May’s uptown apartment was large and comfortably furnished without being studiously decorated or at all pretentious; that her possessions, however, reflected so clearly the traditional tastes of her class suggested that she’d always remain interlinked with her origins in a thousand telling ways, regardless of how willingly she allied herself with the social style of my New York friends, most of whom were Jews from backgrounds not unlike my own. As for her friends—people she’d known for years and had sometimes helped with their interior decorating—after a few nights out with them, I had had to tell her that, affable as it all was, those evenings weren’t for me. It turned out that she was herself a little weary of them too, and one day, after lots of encouragement from me, she decided to quit decorating and redecorating those Upper East Side apartments and enrolled at Hunter to finish her undergraduate education; it had been interrupted in 1952, when she’d suffered an emotional crisis at Smith and, at twenty, had returned home to Cleveland to take up, unhappily, a protected, innocuous postdebutante life. Much as I wanted to help her get herself going as a new woman, I had no desire for her to ape Josie and renounce what she was or cut the ties to where she was from, however unwelcome or uneasy I might have found myself there, and especially as what still interested us both lay precisely in the
unlikeliness
of our connection.

Though slow to develop because of the sexual wariness that each of us had developed late in our twenties, our earnest physical fervor became in time a source of almost mystifying comfort and happiness. In May’s nudity there was something at once furtive and shy that aroused a kind of tender hunger that I couldn’t remember having felt for years. Hers was the body of a sweet-tempered woman who, in her remotest dreams, could never have feigned pregnancy or intentionally allowed herself to become impregnated in order to foster a scenario to which she was pathologically addicted: to make of herself the helpless female victim and of the man the heartless victimizer. There was no strategy in May’s desire; had there been, she wouldn’t have been quite so outfoxed, as she was in college and again later when she came from Cleveland to live alone in New York, by the wily exploiters of trusting girls. For me, the guilelessness that could be construed in the lines of her body as easily as in her gaze seemed to offer a powerful assurance of integrity, and it was from this that my frazzled virility took heart and my regeneration began.

*   *   *

M
AY AND
I
HAD COME TO RENT
houses on Martha’s Vineyard two summers running because of my friendship with Robert Brustein, who was then teaching drama at Columbia and writing theater reviews for the
New Republic.
Bob and his wife, Norma, lived during the year in a big apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where I’d often gone for dinner when I was new to New York and on my own. It was at the Brusteins’ dinner table that I began to find an appreciative audience for a kind of noisy comedy, and the sort of Jewish subject, that wasn’t like anything in
When She Was Good,
the book I was writing about Lucy Nelson of Liberty Center, U.S.A. The spirit of my next book,
Portnoy’s Complaint,
began to materialize as entertainment for Bob and Norma and for the friends of theirs who became my friends, city Jews of my generation, analysands with deep parental attachments, respectable professionals unimpeded by the gentility principle and with a well-developed taste for farcical improvisation, particularly for recycling into boisterous comic mythology the communal values by which our irreducible Jewishness had been shaped. It was an audience I’d lost touch with since I’d left Chicago and begun married life with Josie in Rome, London, Iowa City, and Princeton—an audience knowledgeable enough to discern, even in the minutest detail, where reportage ended and Dada began and to enjoy the ambiguous overlap. Unembarrassed by unrefined Jewish origins, matter-of-factly confident of equal American status, they felt American
through
their families’ immigrant experiences rather than in spite of them and delighted in the shameless airing of extravagant routines concocted from the life we had all grown up with.