The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (22 page)

If you want to reminisce productively, maybe what you should be writing, instead of autobiography, are thirty thousand words from Josie’s point of view.
My Life as a Woman. My Life as a Woman with That Man.
But I hear the objection already. “Her point of view? Don’t you understand, she didn’t
have
a point of view—she was a bloodsucking monster. What she had were fangs!” Yes, you see her as a bitch and you can’t help it and you’ll never be able to help it, certainly not while speaking in your own behalf. I submit to you that she could be seen differently, and not as Lucy Nelson married to Roy Bassart in
When She Was Good,
but as herself married to the real adversary you were.

As you justly point out, she’s what they now categorize and call an a.c.o.a., the adult child of an alcoholic, the victim of a victim, and therefore she has the primary trait of someone with that internal misery, the need to blame her misery on whatever external thing can be blamed. You are the child of an alcoholic father, you first blame the father. Then you marry and you blame the husband. Very likely you marry an alcoholic, unless you’re an alcoholic yourself, which I happen to believe Josie was. I think she was more of an alcoholic than she was a schizophrenic. Did that never occur to you? You say that after you left her in Princeton, she’d phone you at night in New York and drunkenly charge that you were sleeping with a Negress. So she was certainly drinking then—and perhaps the progression had been slow. You say that midway through a botched suicide attempt she was “drunk and drugged.” When you were living with her you probably drank wine before and at dinner—do you remember how much wine she drank? For all of your concentration on your life’s predicaments, you appear to have paid remarkably little attention to a lot she did, though, to be fair, what could you, coming from your background, know about alcoholism? When it’s very bad, alcoholics exaggerate any negative trait of their unfortunate partners—blow it all up and throw it at them. Very destructive stuff; self-destructive destructive stuff. That urine trick, which from your point of view still seems pretty wicked, didn’t seem all that wicked from hers, you know. Not only do people lie when they’ve been drinking, but the distinction between fiction and reality is not always all that clear to them. Whatever is even faintly plausible can also seem quite real. She strongly believed that she
was
the editor of your first published stories, to her that was no lie. And she
could
have been pregnant, she thought. And you
should
have married her, she thought. And even though you didn’t want to marry her, she
needed
you to marry her. And so she pulled that trick, your little Pearl Harbor. Even the obsessive jealousy, her imagining that you would do something with her little girl, that strikes me as part of the picture too.

Yes, I’m convinced that she was an alcoholic, that her disorder was hereditary, biochemical, inherited from her father, and that you didn’t know it because, one, you had no idea what a
shicker
was and, two, she was young then, she ate, and she was healthy, and so the progression was not rapid. Besides, you wanted to look at her through Dostoevskian eyes then and not as though she were merely a candidate for A. A. Eventually she destroyed herself, of course—an addict like her always loses, the addict’s worst fear always comes true—but all the while she continued to believe she could be good but only when
they
were good. I would even imagine that she
wanted
to be good. If only you loved her. If only the children were living with her. If only her father had been better, if only you were better, if only something external changed, she could be good again!

I said before that you were conspiring to make her happen to you, that Josie was the moll in the getaway car, but that doesn’t mean I want to deny entirely that you were a victim as well—the victim of the victim of a victim. You caught the disease, as I see it, because when you live long enough with a disease you get it too. Before marrying Josie you were not that openly angry. But now you became an openly angry angry man. You became so distressingly angry that you needed psychotherapy. You owe that great explosion of anger to her. You thus owe
Portnoy
to her rather more than to Lyndon Johnson.

Am I inventing? I share the tic with you—but then my fiction, if it is fiction, is still perhaps less of a fiction than yours. Look, anything is better than My Ex-Wife the Bitch—I just cannot read that stuff. I certainly don’t mean, by suggesting that she was an alcoholic, to further demean her in the human scale; nor am I saying that by not taking into account that she was an alcoholic, you may have travestied, and done an injustice to, this woman. I’m only saying that maybe it’s time, twenty years on, to find another way to see her. There’s still a tremendous amount of saved-up rage in that stuff about Josie, lots of microbes that are still very active. Sometimes there is a cool gap between you as you were writing this book and you as you were when these things happened, and sometimes there isn’t. I felt all the way through that the book is very equivocal about that: sometimes you seem to be looking back at this twenty-four-year-old, or whatever, a little wryly and at the expense of that person, and sometimes you’re looking back at this person and feeling more or less the same things. But then maybe that’s how everybody looks back at his or her life and is perfectly okay.

Anyway, can
everything
about Josie have been vengeful? I suspect that Josie was both worse and better as a human being than what you’ve portrayed here. There were obviously times, particularly in the beginning—and you hint at this yourself—that you enjoyed her and found her appealing, and there were probably times when she was so luridly psychopathic that you still can’t find your way to a proper description of the disaster you were dragged into. To be sure, I know you try hard to be generous at the conclusion of your horror story by crediting her with being your teacher in extremist fiction. But I think that’s just you being astonishing—you say it to be interesting, not because you believe it. I’m telling you it also happens to be true. I tie the first period of creativity to leaving home as Joe College, and the second I tie to Josie. Everything you are today you owe to an alcoholic shiksa. Tell them
that
next time you’re at Yeshiva. You won’t get out alive.

Last—and then, unlike you, I’ll be done with her—I think you must give Josie her real name. There’s no legal reason to prevent you from using her name, and I think you owe her that. You owe it to her as a character; you owe it to her not because it would be a nice thing to do but because it’s the narratively strong thing to do.

Call the other women whatever you like. (I’m assuming that all the women’s names are changed—why should I not? Your changing them is only an indication of something that the book takes up, which is the conflict about whether you are a nice fellow or not.) What you call them doesn’t matter, they’re unimportant, they’re interchangeable: they’re helpmeets and sexpots and partners and pals. Actually, what’s happened with these women is that not only do you disguise their identities but you shield them from your ability to see through them. You do it here and probably you do it in life, or try to. With them you pull a lot of punches (and pulling punches must finally infuriate you, as it does most everyone). With Josie, however, there are no punches pulled. The reason it’s right to give Josie her real name is because she comes so close, in an elemental way, to being a peer. Josie was about who
she
was, the others are somehow about you. Josie is the real antagonist, the true counterself, and shouldn’t be relegated like the other women to a kind of allegorical role. She’s as real as you are—however much about yourself you may be withholding—and nobody else in this book is. You give your parents their real names, you give your brother his—and, I assume, your childhood and college friends theirs—and you say absolutely nothing about those people. So be it—it’s with Josie, anyway, that you fought the primitive battle that either you didn’t ever fight with your family, or you’re unwilling to fight in remembering them now, or you have fought with them only by proxy, through Alexander Portnoy and through me.

I’m speaking of the primitive battle over who is going to survive. It’s clear with the other women that you are going to survive. The others call forth your maturity, challenge and coerce it, and you deliver, you meet that challenge easily. With Josie, however, you regress, shamelessly and dangerously. She undoes you where ordinarily you do up everyone else. You take them up and you do them up and when you’ve done them up you leave them. But she undoes you and undoes you and undoes you. She even tries, driving out of Rome in that little Renault, to kill you. And then she dies. Josie’s project is to incarnate destructive force and destroy the forces that try to destroy her. She is the heroine of this book, not in any sympathetic way, but that’s neither here nor there when it comes to heroes and heroines. Josie is the heroine you were looking for. She provided your incredible opportunity, really—your escape from being the dominating consciousness in every situation. She took you in; she conned you. You were had. Somebody who is mentally very tricky, who hears the reverberations of everything he’s ever said, somebody hypersensitively aware of his impact and very skillful at gauging it, was no longer calling the shots. She was. Honor with her name the demon who did that, the psychopath through whose agency you achieved the freedom from being a pleasing, analytic, lovingly manipulative good boy who would never have been much of a writer. Reward with her real name the destructive force that, right along with the angry Jews, hurled you, howling, into a struggle with repression and inhibition and humiliation and fear. Fanatical security, fanatical insecurity—this dramatic duality that you see embodied in the Jews, Josie unearthed in her Jew and beautifully exploited. And with you, as with the other Jews, that is not merely where the drama is rooted, that’s where the madness begins.

It’s only right that she have her real name in there, just as you have yours.

I don’t like the way you treat May either. I don’t mean the way you treat her in life; I don’t care about that. I mean the way she’s treated as a subject here. Here you lose your head completely—here the poor plebeian Jew from Newark is so impressed: how calm she was, how patrician she looked, how the very lines of her body bespoke guilelessness, nay,
integrity,
how very upper class her East Side apartment was. “May’s uptown apartment was large and comfortably furnished without being at all this or that. Reflected the traditional tastes of her class…” The
awful
tastes of her class. There is nothing
worse
than the taste of the American WASP upper class. Refined? I imagine you may even have had a far more refined background than May Aldridge did. Economically pinched perhaps, uneducated, profoundly conventional, but there was a dignity, certainly, to your mother; and even when the Boss comes to the house, and the whole family is in awe of him, there is still dignity there in your father. Untutored, deprived of high culture, but
not
unrefined. I’ll bet May’s background was completely deprived of high culture. Her family certainly never read any real books; they went to the right schools perhaps but sure as hell didn’t read the right books or give a crap about them. But you won’t see that here, will you, you are so impressed. And naturally at the time you
were
impressed—but as much as this?

I don’t believe it. As a reader of
Portnoy’s Complaint,
of
My Life as a Man,
as a reader of what you say here about Metropolitan Life discriminating against their Jewish employees back in your father’s era, I suspect a lot about her class and her background and her taste, far from impressing you, positively disgusted you. I’d bet that, as your father’s avenger, you even berated her sometimes when she displayed the habits of her class and her background. But about that, nothing. Be candid—what
didn’t
you like about May? There must have been plenty if you left her; I don’t believe it could have been only your youthful liberty you were looking for—you also wanted to be rid of her for a very good and specific reason. So, what was it? After an emotional breakdown she dropped out of Smith and went home to Cleveland. Was there no aftereffect, no legacy of brokenness that you couldn’t stand? Was she beautifully composed or utterly repressed, or were the two impossible to separate in her? Her “gentle” nature was probably as infuriating to you—because of all it implied about her vulnerability and defenselessness—as it was comforting, at first, after Josie’s rages. It is chivalrous to find in yourself the sole reason for ending the affair, but in autobiography chivalry is an evasion and a lie. Maybe you are still a little in love with her or like to think that you are. Maybe at fifty-five you are suddenly in love now with those years of your life. But her idealization did not occur at the time, did it? Her idealization is a necessity of this autobiography.

You didn’t want another broken woman.
That’s
the reason. Of course she didn’t have Josie’s working-class harshness; May was placid, she stuffed her feelings, kept up her facade. But tell me, please, what was
her
addiction? Was she a pill popper like Susan McCall, her obvious embodiment in
My Life as a Man?
Surely Susan’s pill popping is meant to stand for some addiction, if it isn’t simply the flat-out truth. The main fear of every addict is a fear of losing, a fear of change; addicts are always looking for someone to be dependent on, they
have
to be dependent, and you were perfect. You were, after all, brought up to be reliable, and this reliability is a magnet to the broken, whether addicted, fatherless, or both. They latch on and they won’t let go, and because you
are
reliable it’s not easy for you to leave a job half done, especially when the reliability is being tested—and Josie went in for extreme testing, so extreme she eventually made you marry her. You’re a crutch, you are flattered to be a crutch, you rush in to hold them up, and then you’re holding them up and holding them up and you begin to ask yourself, “Is a crutch what I want to be?” I remember now that marathon struggle in
My Life as a Man
to make Susan come. Anything here about anything like that? Of course not. Here you investigate virtually nothing of a serious sexual nature and, somewhat astonishingly, seem almost to indicate that sex has never really compelled you.