by Philip Roth
* * *
Imagine. Because of how I’d been provoked by Sarah in the church and then affronted in the restaurant, it was conceivable that my marriage was about to break up. Maria had said it was just too stupid, but stupidity happens unfortunately to be real, and no less capable of governing the mind than fear, lust, or anything else. The burden isn’t either/or, consciously choosing from possibilities equally difficult and regrettable—it’s and/and/and/and/and as well. Life is and: the accidental and the immutable, the elusive and the graspable, the bizarre and the predictable, the actual and the potential, all the multiplying realities, entangled, overlapping, colliding, conjoined—plus the multiplying illusions! This times this times this times this … Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? I didn’t think so when I left the house.
That there were people in England who, even after Hitler might have been thought to have somewhat tarnished the Jew-hater’s pride, still harbored a profound distaste for Jews hadn’t come as a surprise. The surprise wasn’t even that Maria should extend as much tolerance as she did to her mother, or that, so improbably, she should have been naïve enough to believe that she was averting a disaster by pretending that there wasn’t that kind of poison around. The unpredictable development was how furious it all made me. But then I had been wholly unprepared—usually it was the Semites, and not the anti-Semites, who assaulted me for being the Jew I was. Here in England I was all at once experiencing first-hand something I had never personally been bruised by in America. I felt as though gentlest England had suddenly reared up and bit me on the neck—there was a kind of irrational scream in me saying, “She’s not on my side—she’s on their side!” I’d considered very deeply and felt vicariously the wounds that Jews have had to endure, and, contrary to the charges by my detractors of literary adventurism, my writing had hardly been born of recklessness or naïveté about the Jewish history of pain; I had written my fiction in the knowledge of it, and even in consequence of it, and yet the fact remained that, down to tonight, the experience of it had been negligible in my personal life. Crossing back to Christian Europe nearly a hundred years after my grandparents’ westward escape, I was finally feeling up against my skin that outer reality which I’d mostly come to know in America as an “abnormal” inner preoccupation permeating nearly everything within the Jewish world.
All this being so, I still had to wonder if I wasn’t suffering from the classic psychosemitic ailment rather than the serious clinical disease, if I wasn’t perhaps a paranoid Jew attaching false significance to a manageable problem requiring no more than common sense to defuse—if I wasn’t making them all stand for far too much and overimagining everything; if I wasn’t wanting the anti-Semitism to be there, and in a big way. When Maria had implored me not to pursue it, why hadn’t I listened? Talking about it, going on about it, mercilessly prolonging that discussion, it was inevitable that we would reach the burning sore. But then it wasn’t as though I had been unprovoked or that separating us from all this vile stuff was wholly within my power. Of course resisting provocation is always an option, but can you really have your sister-in-law calling you a dirty Jew bastard, and someone else saying that you’re stinking up the place, and then someone you love saying why do you make such a production of these things, without your head starting to explode, no matter what sort of peaceable person you’ve tried turning yourself into? It was even possible that far from making them stand for too much, I had come upon a deep, insidious Establishment anti-Semitism that is latent and pervasive but that, among the mild, well-brought-up, generally self-concealing English, only the occasional misfit like a madwoman or a fucked-up sister actually comes out with. Otherwise by and large it’s subliminal, one can’t hear it, no rampant signs anywhere you look, except perhaps in the peculiarly immoderate, un-English-like Israel-loathing that the young people at that dinner party had seemed to go in for.
In America, I thought, where people claim and disown “identities” as easily as they slap on bumper stickers—where even though there are people sitting in clubs who think it’s still the land of Aryans, it just don’t happen to be so—I could act like a reasonable fellow when she’d distinguished Jews from Caucasians. But here, where you were swathed permanently in what you were born with, encased for life with where you began, here in a real land of Aryans, with a wife whose sister, if not her mother as well, appeared to be the pointwoman for some pure-blooded phalanx out to let me know that I was not welcome and had better not come in, I couldn’t let the insult pass. Our affinity was strong and real, but however much complicity we’d felt at the carol service, Maria and I were not anthropologists in Somali-land, nor were we orphans in a storm: she came from somewhere and so did I, and those differences we talked so much about could begin to have a corrosive effect once the charm began wearing thin. We couldn’t just be “us” and say the hell with “them” any more than we could say to hell with the twentieth century when it intruded upon our idyll. Here’s the problem, I thought: even if her mother is a completely entrenched and bigoted upper-class snob, Maria loves her and is trapped by that—she doesn’t really want her mother referring to her pagan grandchild and yet she doesn’t want to fight me either, while I, for my part, don’t intend to lose—not the woman, the baby, or the argument. How do I salvage what I want out of this clash of atavistic wills?
God, how enraging to blunder smilingly into people who want no part of you—and how awful to compromise, even for love. When asked to accede, whether by Gentile or Jew, I discover that all my efforts seem to go against it.
The past, the unevadable past, had gained control and was about to vandalize our future unless I did something to stop it. We could digest each other so easily, but not the history clinging to the clan that each of us brought along into our life. Is it really possible that I will go around with the sense that, however subtly, she is buying into their anti-Semitism, that I will hear echoes of the anti-Semite in her, and that she will see in me a Jew who can’t do otherwise than let being a Jew eclipse everything else? Is it possible that neither of us can control this old, old stuff? What if there’s no extracting her from a world I don’t wish to enter even if I were welcome there?
What I did was to hail a taxi to take me to Chiswick, to the house on the river that we had bought and were remodeling to encapsulate what we had imagined we had, the house that was being transformed into ours and that represented my own transformation—the house that represented the rational way, the warm human enclosure that would shelter and protect something more than my narrative mania. It seemed at that moment that everything was imaginatively possible for me except the mundane concreteness of a home and a family.
Because walls were coming down and not every floorboard was in place, I didn’t wander around inside, even though when I tried the front door I found it unlocked. A lonely midnight visit to the unfinished haven was sufficiently symbolic of my predicament without overwriting the scene entirely by stumbling around in the dark and breaking my neck. Instead, I wandered from window to window, peering in as though I were casing the joint, and then I sat on the sill of the French doors to the terrace, staring out at the Thames. There was nothing gliding by but water. I could see the lights of some of the houses through the branches of the trees on the far side of the river. They seemed tiny and far away. It was like looking across to a foreign country—from one foreign country to another.
I sat for nearly an hour like somebody who’s lost his key, all alone, feeling pretty forlorn and rather cold, but gradually I quieted down and was breathing more evenly again. Even if it wasn’t yet snug and glowing above the water, the tangibility of the house helped to remind me of all that I had worked so hard to suppress in order to make contact with these ordinary, temporal satisfactions. The tangibility of that half-rebuilt, unoccupied house made me reconsider very seriously whether what had happened warranted this drama, if the evidence was adequate for what my feelings had co
ncluded. When I looked back over the last year and recalled the obstinacy and resilience with which we had successfully combated whatever had blocked our way, I felt ridiculous for being so easily overwhelmed and feeling so innocently victimized. You do not go from being a conventionally unhappy married mother and a thrice-divorced, childless literary anchorite to being partners in a flourishing domestic life as father-to-be and pregnant wife, you do not proceed in fourteen months to thoroughly rearrange nearly everything important to you by being two helpless weaklings together.
What had happened? Nothing particularly original. We had a fight, our first, nothing more or less annihilating than that. What had overcharged the rhetoric and ignited the resentment was of course her role of mother’s daughter rubbing against mine of father’s son—our first fight hadn’t even been ours. But then the battle initially rocking most marriages is usually just that—fought by surrogates for real antagonists whose conflict is never rooted in the here and now but sometimes originates so far back that all that remains of the grandparents’ values are the newly-weds’ ugly words. Virginal they may wish to be, but the worm in the dream is always the past, that impediment to all renewal.
So what do I say when I get home? What do I do now, now that I know all this? Do I run up the stairs and kiss her as though everything’s fine, do I wake her to tell her all I’ve been thinking—or isn’t it better to come quietly and unobtrusively into the house and leave the damage to be repaired by the mundane glue of the round of life? Only what if she isn’t there, if upstairs is dark and the house still because she’s gone to share Phoebe’s divan at her aunt’s flat? What if the interminable day that began at dawn Middle Eastern Time in a taxi from Jerusalem to the airport security check ends with Maria fleeing Kensington from a militant Jew? From Israel, to the crypt, to the banquette, to the divorce court. In this world, I’m the terrorist.
If she isn’t there.
Sitting and staring across the dark river, I envision a return of the life I’d fought free of by anchoring myself to Maria. This woman of profound forbearance and moral courage, this woman of seductive fluency whose core is reticence and discretion, this woman whose emotional knowledge is extraordinary, whose intellect is so clear and touching, who, even though she favors one sexual position, is hardly innocent of what love and desire are about, a bruised, deliciously civilized woman, articulate, intelligent, coherent, with a lucid understanding of the terms of life and that marvelous gift for recitative—what if she isn’t there? Imagine Maria gone, my life without all that, imagine no outer life of any meaning, myself completely otherless and reabsorbed within—all the voices once again only mine ventriloquizing, all the conflicts germinated by the tedious old clashing of contradictions within. Imagine—instead of a life inside something other than a skull, only the isolating unnaturalness of self-battling. No, no—no, no, no, this chance may be my last and I’ve disfigured myself enough already. When I return, let me find in the bed, beneath our blanket, all those beautiful undulations that are not syntactical, hips that are not words, soft living buttocks that are not my invention—let me find sleeping there what I’ve worked for and what I want, a woman with whom I’m content, pregnant with our future, her lungs quietly billowing with life’s real air. For if she should be gone, should there be only a letter beside my pillow …
But forgo the lament (which everyone who’s ever been locked out of anything knows by heart)—what exactly is in that letter? Being Maria’s, it could be interesting. This is a woman who could teach me things. How have I lost her—if I’ve lost her—this contact, this connection to a full and actual outer existence, to a potent, peaceful, happy life? Imagine that.
I’m leaving.
I’ve left.
I’m leaving you.
I’m leaving the book.
That’s it. Of course. The book! She conceives of herself as my fabrication, brands herself a fantasy and cleverly absconds, leaving not just me but a promising novel of cultural warfare barely written but for the happy beginning.
Dear Nathan,
I’m leaving. I’ve left. I’m leaving you and I’m leaving the book and I’m taking Phoebe away before anything dreadful happens to her. I know characters rebelling against their author has been done before, but as my choice of a first husband should have made clear—at least to me—I have no desire to be original and never did. I loved you and it was kind of thrilling to live totally as somebody else’s invention, since, alas, that is how I am bent anyway, but even my terrible tameness has its limits, and I will be better off with Phoebe back where we began, living upstairs with him. Sure it’s lovely being listened to as opposed to being shut up, but it’s also quite creepy to think that I am monitored closely only to be even more manipulated and exploited than I was when you extracted me (for artistic purposes) from my situation upstairs. This stuff isn’t for me, and I warned you as much in the beginning. When I begged you not to write about me, you assured me that you can’t write “about” anyone, that even when you try to, it comes out someone else. Well, insufficiently someone else to suit me. I recognize that radical change is the law of life and that if everything quietens down on one front, it invariably gets noisy on another; I recognize that to be born, to live, and to die is to change form, but you overdo it. It was not fair to put me through your illness and the operation and your death. “Wake up, wake up, Maria—it was all only a dream!” But that gets wearing after a while. I can’t take a lifetime of never knowing if you’re fooling. I can’t be toyed with forever. At least with my English tyrant I knew where I stood and could behave accordingly. With you that’ll never be.
And how do I know what’s to happen to Phoebe? That terrifies me. You weren’t beyond killing your brother, you weren’t beyond killing yourself, or grandiosely amusing yourself on the plane up from Israel by staging a lunatic hijack attempt—what if you decide everything will be more interesting if my daughter steps off the towpath into the river? When I think about literary surgery being performed experimentally upon those I love, I understand what drives the antivivisectionists nuts. You had no right to make Sarah, in that crypt, say words she would never have spoken if it weren’t for your Jewish hang-up. Not only was it unnecessary, it was cruelly provocative. Since I had already confided to you that Jews seem to me too quick finding fault with Gentiles, condemning things as horrendously anti-Semitic, or even mildly so, when they aren’t, you made sure to provide me with a sister who is anti-Semitic in spades. And then that creature at the restaurant, planted there by you, and just when everything was so perfect, the loveliest evening I’d had in years. Why do these things always happen when you’re all set up for a wonderful time? Why isn’t it okay for us to be happy? Can’t you imagine that? Try for a change confining your fantasies to satisfaction and pleasure. That shouldn’t be so hard—most people do it as a matter of course. You are forty-five years old and something of a success—it’s high time you imagined life working out. Why this preoccupation with irresolvable conflict? Don’t you want a new mental life? I was once foolish enough to think that’s what this was all about and why you wanted me, not to reenact the dead past but to strike out happily on a new course, to rise in exuberant rebellion against your author and remake your life. I had the temerity to think that I was having a tremendous effect. Why did you have to ruin everything with this anti-Semitic outburst against which you now must rage like a zealot from Agor? New York you made into a horror by perversely playing Carnovsky out in reverse with that ghastly experiment in impotence. I for one would rather have taken the part of Marvelous Maria the porn-queen fellator in some interminable priapic romp—even all the choking would have been preferable to the terrible sadness of seeing you crushed in that way. And now, in London, the Jews. When everything was going so beautifully, the Jews. Can’t you ever forget your Jews? How can that turn out to be—particularly in someone who’s been around as much as you—your irreducible core? It is boring, boring and regressive and crazy to continue on about your connection t
o a group into which you simply happened to have been born, and a very long time ago at that. Disgusting as you’ve discovered my Englishness to be, I’m really not wedded to it, or to any label, in the way that most of you Jews do persist in being Jewish. Hasn’t the man who has led your life been a loyal child long enough?
