The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  But what about the first time round?

  I saw the other side of him, the irrational, the violent side of him. I don’t mean physically, I mean how he would turn everything that wasn’t familiar to him into the outsider—that I had been used in that way too, and that my family had been maligned most terribly. Of course, like all English families they thought of the outsider as the outsider, but it doesn’t mean that they have those feelings that he had given them, of superiority and loathing—of apartheid, so to speak. My sister, perhaps not the best character in the world, is nonetheless only a poor, pathetic girl who never found her place anywhere, who’s never been able to do anything, but to her he ascribed these terrible feelings about Jews and a disgusting sense of superiority that, if you knew Sarah, was ludicrous. You see, he had met my sister Sarah once, when she came to visit—I’d introduced them, as though he were just a neighbor. But what he had taken from my sister was so far from what she was that I thought there was something deeply twisted in him that he couldn’t help. Because he had been brought up as he was, ringed round by all that Jewish paranoia, there was something in him that twisted everything. It seemed to me that he was my sister—he was the one who thought of “the other” as the other in that derogatory sense. He’d put all his feelings, actually, onto her—his Jewish feelings about Christian women turned into a Christian woman’s feelings about a Jewish man. I thought that the great verbal violence, that “hymn of hate” he ascribed to Sarah, was in him.

  But what about love for you in “Christendom”?

  Oh, the subject is his love for, in quotations, me. But you can see at the end of it, when they have this quarrel, what the chances are for that love. Even though you know he goes back to her, and they pick up their lives, their lives are going to be tremendously difficult. You know that absolutely. Because he had tremendous ambivalence about a Christian woman. I was a Christian woman.

  But you’re talking about what “Christendom” is like, not about what Nathan was like. This never came up between you, did it?

  It never came up because we never lived together. We had a romantic affair. Never before had I been so romantically involved with anyone. Nothing came up between us, except that operation. We met as if in a time capsule, imprisoned by my fear of discovery, like something one reads about in a nineteenth-century novel. There’s a sense in which it’s completely fictitious. I could believe I made the whole thing up. And that’s not just because it’s now gone—it was the same when it was in the very active present. I don’t know what our life would have been like had we been able to live together. I saw no violent feelings—because of the drug there wasn’t even a chance for good old-fashioned genital aggression. I saw only tenderness. The drug had done that as well—overtenderized him. That was what he secretly couldn’t stand. It was the aggression he wanted to recover too.

  But his imaginative life might have remained quite separate from your real life. Your sister would have been your sister to him, not the sister he imagined.

  I’ve never lived with a novelist, you know. On first reading I took it all rather literally, as a bad critic would take it—I took it as People magazine would take it. After all, he used our names, he used people who were recognizably themselves and yet radically different. I think he might have changed the names later on. I’m sure he would have changed them. Of course I can see how Mariolatry appealed to him; in the circumstances he invented, Maria is the perfect name. And if it was the perfect name, he might not have changed it. But surely he would have changed Sarah’s name.

  And his name, would he have changed that?

  I’m not so sure—maybe in a later draft. But if he wanted to, he would have used it. I’m not a writer, so I don’t know how far these people will go for the desired effect.

  But you are a writer.

  Oh, only in a very minor risk-free league. That’s all he was. Anyway, I read this story, or chapter, or fragment, whatever it was to be, this draft, and I didn’t know what to do. All my life I despised Lady Byron, and Lady Burton, all those people who destroyed their husbands’ memoirs, and letters, and erotic writings. It’s always seemed to me the most incredible crime that we’ll never know what those letters of Byron’s contained. I thought of these women quite deliberately, quite consciously—I thought, “I think I am going to do with this what they have done that I’ve despised all my life.” It’s the first time that I understood why they did it.

  But you didn’t do it.

  I cannot destroy the only thing he cared about, the only thing he had left. He had no children, he had no wife, he had no family: the only thing left was these pages. Into this went his unconsumed potency as a man. This imaginary life is our offspring. This is really the child he wanted. It’s simple—I couldn’t commit infanticide. I knew that if it was published, unfinished, in this form, all the characters would be quite identifiable, but I thought the only thing I could do, with my husband, was to lie my way out of it. I thought, “I’m going to say, ‘Yes, it’s me—he met my sister, he used everybody, he used us. I knew the man very slightly. I knew him a little more than you thought I did, we had a coffee together, we went for a walk in the park, but I know how jealous you are and I never told you.’” I would say that he had been impotent and we never had an affair, but we were good friends, and that this is fantasy. And it is. I’ll lie my way out and I’ll also be telling the truth. I thought of tearing it up and throwing it down the incinerator chute, but in the end I couldn’t. I’m not taking part in destroying a book just because the author isn’t here to protect it. I left it on the desk, where it was when I came in.

  You’re in a lot of hot water, aren’t you?

  Why? If my marriage breaks up because of that, then it does. I think it’ll take at least a year before it’s published. I’ll have a year to pull myself together, to think up fairy stories, and perhaps even to leave my husband. But I’m not going to destroy Nathan’s last words for a marriage that I’m unhappy in.

  Perhaps this is the way out of that marriage.

  Perhaps. It’s true, I would never have the courage to say, “I want a divorce”—this is certainly much easier for me than saying, “I have a lover and I want a divorce.” Let him find it out, if he wants to. He’s not a great reader, by the way, not anymore.

  I think it’ll be brought to his attention.

  If I want to disguise myself, the only chance I have is to go to his editor and to say, “Look, I know, because he showed it to me, what he was writing. I know that he used characters very close to me and my family. He used our names. But he had said to me that this is only a draft, and if the book is published I’m going to change the names.” I’ll say to his editor, “If the book is published the names have to be changed. I have no threat to make—I’m only saying that otherwise it’ll destroy my life.” I don’t think he’ll do it, I don’t think he can do it, but it’s probably what I shall do.

  But its publication won’t destroy your life.

  No, no, it won’t—it is my way out.

  And that’s why you didn’t destroy the manuscript.

  Is it?

  If you had a good marriage you certainly would have.

  If I had a good marriage I wouldn’t have been down there in the first place.

  You two had an interesting time, didn’t you?

  It was interesting, all right. But I will not take responsibility for his death … to go back to that. It’s very hard to step away from that, isn’t it? I don’t believe that he did it only for me. As I said, he would have done it anyway—he would have done it for somebody else. He would have done it for himself. Being the man he was, he didn’t see that to women like me the impotence was of secondary importance. He couldn’t understand it. He said to me, “A time comes when you have to forget what frightens you most.” But I don’t think it was dying that most frightened him—it was facing the impotence for the rest of his life. That is frightening, and that he couldn’t forget, certainly not so long as my presence was th
ere to remind him. I was the one who was there at the time, of course—he was in love with me, but at the time. If it wasn’t me, it would have been somebody else later.

  That you’ll never know. You may have been desired more than you can bear to believe right now—no less loved in life than you are in “Christendom.”

  Oh, yes, the dream life that we had together in that fictional house-to-be. The way it sort of vaguely might have been. He didn’t know Strand on the Green in Chiswick. I told him about it and how, when I’d first got married, I’d dreamed of living there and having a house there. I suppose I gave him that idea. I showed him a picture postcard of it once, the towpath protecting the houses from the Thames, and the willows leaning over the water.

  Did you tell him about the incident at the restaurant?

  No, no. In the sixties he’d spent a summer in London with one of his wives, and he told me what had happened to them in a restaurant there and what he has in the story happening with me. It certainly wasn’t like him to make a scene in a restaurant. Though I really wouldn’t know—we were never in a restaurant. How does one know what is real or false with a writer like that? These people aren’t fantasists, they’re imaginers—it’s the difference between a flasher and a stripper. Making you believe what he wanted you to believe was his very reason for being. Maybe his only reason. I was intrigued by the way he’d turned events, or hints I had given him about people, into reality—that is, his kind of reality. This obsessive reinvention of the real never stopped, what-could-be having always to top what-is. For instance, my mother is not a woman like the mother in “Christendom” who’s written outstanding books but an extremely ordinary English woman, living in the country, who’s never done anything of interest in her life and never set pen to paper. However, the only thing I ever told him about her, once, was that like most provincial English women of her class, she has a touch of anti-Semitism. This of course has been built into something gigantic and awful. Look at me. After reading “Christendom” twice I went upstairs, and when my husband came home, I began to wonder which was real, the woman in the book or the one I was pretending to be upstairs. Neither of them was particularly “me.” I was acting just as much upstairs; I was not myself just as much as Maria in the book was not myself. Perhaps she was. I began not to know which was true and which was not, like a writer when he comes to believe that he’s imagined what he hasn’t. When I saw my sister, I resented the things she said to Nathan in the church—in the book. I was confused, deeply confused. It was obviously a very strong experience to read it. The book began living in me all the time, more than my everyday life.

  So now what?

  I’m going to sit back and see what happens. The one thing he did get about me in that story, the fact of my character, is that I’m deeply passive. And yet inside there is some mechanism that ticks away and tells me what is the right thing to do. I always seem to preserve myself in some way. But in a very circular manner. I think I shall be rescued.

  By what he wrote.

  It’s begun to look that way, hasn’t it? I think that my husband will read it, that he will ask me about it, that I will lie, that he will not believe me. My husband will have to come to grips with what has been going on in our lives for some time now. He’s not such a hypocrite as to find this utterly surprising. I do think he has another life. I think he has a mistress; I’m sure of it. I think he’s as deeply unhappy as I am. He and I are caught up in a terrible, neurotic symbiosis that both of us are rather ashamed of. But what he’ll do because of “Christendom” I don’t know. He’s, on the one hand, very comme il faut, he wants to rise quickly in the diplomatic service, he wants to run for Parliament, he wants quite a bit—but he is also sexually very competitive, and if this looks to him like an affront to his manhood, he does have it in him to do dreadful things. I don’t know what exactly, but his spitefulness can be quite inventive, and, in a very modest way, he could make sort of what used to be called a scandal. He’d have no real motive for kicking up a horrible fuss, other than to make my life unpleasant. But people do that all the time. Especially if they think they can put you in a position of wrong. You know: thou art more treacherous than me. I just don’t know what he’ll do, but what I want, above all, is finally to go home. Nathan’s story has made me terribly homesick. I don’t want to live in New York any more. I dread going back to my family. They’re not so disagreeable as Nathan described, but neither are they very intelligent, by any means. He both heightened their intelligence and lowered their conscience and their moral tone. They’re just deeply boring people who sit and watch television, and that was too boring for him—to put into a book, I mean. I don’t think I’ll be able to bear that for long either, but I don’t really have the money to set up by myself, and I don’t want to ask my husband for anything. I’ll have to get a job. But after all I speak several languages, I’m still only twenty-eight, I have only one child, and there’s no reason why I can’t pick my life up. Even a well-bred penniless girl can get a job cleaning houses. I’ll just have to get up and go out hawking myself like everybody else.

  What do you think he loved so about you?

  Drop the “so” and I’ll answer. I was pretty, I was young, I was intelligent, I was very needy. I had tremendous wooability—I was there. Very much there—just upstairs. Upstairs downstairs. He called the lift our deus ex machina. I was foreign enough for him, but not so foreign as to make it taboo-foreign or bizarre-foreign. I was touchable-foreign, less boring to him than the equivalent American woman he was partial to. I wasn’t that different in class from the women he’d married; as far as class and interests go, we were really very much the same kind of women, fairly refined, intelligent, amenable, educated, Nathanly coherent, but I was English and that made it less familiar. He liked my sentences. He said to me before he went into the hospital, “I’m the man who fell in love with a relative clause.” He liked my speech, my English archaisms and my schoolgirl slang. Oddly, those American women were really “the shiksa,” but because I was English I think there was even a difference in that. I was surprised in “Christendom” by his rather romantic idea of me. Maybe that’s what one always feels when one reads about oneself—if you’re written about, if you’re turned into a character in a book, unless it is really crushingly derogatory, the very fact of being focused on like that is somehow curiously romanticizing. He certainly exaggerated my beauty.

  But not your age. It didn’t hurt that you were twenty-eight. He liked that.

  All men like that you’re twenty-eight. The twenty-two-year-old men like it, and the forty-five-year-old men like it, and even the twenty-eight-year-old men don’t seem to be bothered too much. Yes, it’s a very good age. It’s probably a very good age to stay.

  Well, you will, in the book.

  Yes, and I’ll have that dress, the dress that I wear at the restaurant. This perfectly ordinary dress I had, he made into something so voluptuous and beautiful. That pleasant, old-fashioned night out he gave us, such an old-fashioned fifties idea he had about having a night out at an expensive restaurant with the woman who’s having your baby and has the hormonal glow. How romantically extravagant, and how innocent, the bracelet he gives me for my birthday. What a surprise. The wish-fulfillment aspect is very touching. It’s too late to say I was moved, but I was, to put it mildly. The romantic life we might have had, in the Chiswick home … I don’t think he really wanted any of these things, mind you. I’m not even sure he wanted me. He may well have wanted me as copy. Yet I do think, however much he romanticized my desirability, he saw me in an extremely cruel and clear way. Because with all the affection, he still does see her—my—passivity. I am all talk. And, yes, I do like money, I do like good things, I do like much more of a frivolous life, I presume, than he would have liked. The carol service, for instance. I actually wasn’t there with him, in the church, as he has it in the story—that was in New York, that carol service, with a real Christian wife—but the point is that people go to carol service for
fun, not because they believe in Jesus Christ or the Holy Virgin or whatever but just to have a good time. I think he never understood that side of me. I like to passively enjoy my life. I never wanted to be anything or to do anything. A lot of people do things not for the deep Jewish or religious reasons that he thinks they do, but they just do them—there are no questions to be asked. He asked so many questions, all of them interesting, but not always from the other person’s point of view. I’m like everything else in the story: he elevated and intensified everything. That’s what made the operation inevitable—he intensified and heightened his illness too, as though it were taking place in a novel. The writer’s refusal to accept things as they are—everything reinvented, even himself. Maybe he wanted that operation for copy too, to see what that drama was like. That’s not impossible. He was always, I believe the expression is, upping the ante—“Christendom” is just that. Well, he upped it once too far, and it killed him. He did with his life exactly what he did in his fiction, and finally paid for it. He finally confused the two—just what he was always warning everybody against. So did I momentarily confuse things, I suppose—began to collaborate with him on a far more interesting drama than the one I had going upstairs. That, upstairs, was just another conventional domestic farce, so every afternoon, I took the deus ex machina down to the oldest romantic drama in the world. “Go ahead, save me, risk your life and save me—and I’ll save you.” Vitality together. Vitality at any price, the nature of all heroism. Life as an act. What could be more un-English? I yielded too. Only I survived and he hasn’t.