Roth had completed his M.A. at the University of Chicago before going into the army. After getting out, he returned to Chicago, in September 1956, thrilled at being hired to teach freshman composition—at twenty-three, he was the youngest member of the English department—while continuing his graduate studies and still having time, between teaching and learning, to write. It was his first real professional job, he found Chicago exhilarating, and he was determined, as he wrote in The Facts, “to exercise my freedom to its utmost.” With his army separation pay, he had bought a suit at Brooks Brothers (three pieces, glen plaid) that he wore to teach his classes; with four hundred dollars that he saved up writing movie reviews for The New Republic (twenty-five dollars every two weeks), he acquired an eight-year-old car. Although he was wearing a steel-ribbed brace under the suit to help with continuing back pain, and he had hardly any money, he gave the impression of a young man who was going places. Still, he had a hard time getting Maggie to agree to a date when, that October, he cornered her in the doorway of a bookshop and told her everything that he’d managed to find out about her—she was from Michigan, she had worked as a waitress, she had two children—after having noticed her a couple of years before.
In The Facts, written some thirty years later, Roth did not use her real first name—he calls her Josie—partly out of respect for her children. But he recounts in detail how he wooed her, Othello-like, with the exotic narrative of his New Jersey past: Campbell’s tomato soup simmering on the stove when he came home from school at lunchtime; neatly ironed pajamas when it was time for bed. Ironically, it was Maggie’s accounts of her far less winning childhood and the dangers she had passed that roped him in. Four years older than Roth, she was the daughter of an alcoholic father who was in jail for petty theft throughout the years that Roth knew her. Smart enough to have got into the University of Chicago at seventeen, she was unfortunate enough to have had to leave school after less than a year, when she got pregnant, at eighteen; or, rather, she was smart enough to get Roth to believe this story—that Maggie had gone to college at all turned out to be one of her many, many lies. Indisputably, though, she was now a divorcée whose ex-husband had custody of their children. And she had recently left the waitressing job in the diner where Roth had noticed her for an office job at the same university where he was busy grading papers and reading Henry James.
She had lived outside books. She seemed to him to be, in the words of a character in Letting Go, “so much more adult and genuine, more in contact with life’s realities,” than he could hope to be. (And certainly more adult, it seemed, than the New Jersey girlfriend, Maxine Groffsky, whom he would eventually turn into Brenda Patimkin and with whom he now parted ways.) Even his time in the army had not provided anything like her experience. As Roth saw it later, looking back on himself as a literary-minded naïf, he had been determined to “capitalize the L in life.” Long habituated to easily mastering whatever challenges came his way, he was looking for “something difficult and dangerous to happen to me.” And he found it.
The union of Philip Roth and Maggie Williams may have been the most painfully destructive and lastingly influential literary marriage since Scott and Zelda. Early on, Roth created a loving portrait of Maggie in Letting Go, in the character of a blond waitress and mother of two named Martha Reganhart, who takes up with one of the story’s tortured heroes. Martha is warmhearted, sexy, wry, and none too bookish but very smart. No one puts anything over on Martha, and if her housekeeping skills are questionable and her taste in clothes sometimes embarrassing to her more aesthetically refined lover, she is nevertheless the most lively and likable character in the book. There is no doubt that she loves her children—even if she can’t protect them—and her little boy and girl are also lovingly drawn. (Roth had spent a good deal of time with Maggie’s children by the time he was writing the book.) It’s uncertain how long it took Roth to realize how “idealized”—his word today—this portrait was, and that the very trials he had admired Maggie for enduring had left her irreparably scarred.
They broke up several times during his second year of teaching in Chicago. After one such occasion, Roth went to a campus reading by Saul Bellow, accompanied by his new girlfriend, a beautiful and wealthy graduate student named Susan Glassman. Maggie was also in the audience, and, as Roth recounts the story, he went over to say hello while his date went off to speak with Bellow. (A furiously insulting note from Maggie about her replacement was waiting in Roth’s mailbox when he got back home.) It is intriguing to imagine the turns the American novel might have taken had Susan Glassman not bedazzled Bellow that afternoon and gone on to become his third wife three years later. They were married for four years—Bellow had two more wives still to come—and, after a bitter divorce, Glassman became the model for a number of unpleasant women in Bellow’s work. The larger question, though, is how Roth’s work would have been affected if Glassman had remained with her date that afternoon and kept Maggie Williams from becoming Mrs. Philip Roth.
It’s an idle game, but what gives it interest is Roth’s response when I make the suggestion to him: What if he had married Susan Glassman instead of Maggie? To my surprise, he takes the problem by its other handle and explains that he could never have been married to Glassman because she was so beautiful and rich and had gone to Radcliffe, and he would have been “completely defenseless” against her. “What would I have done, just kissed her feet all the time?” The answer seems to provide a glint of insight into Maggie’s appeal, scars and all. At the beginning, at least, when what was broken in her seemed within his powers to repair, when the dark Jewish boy was also the white knight, her needs and her brokenness seem to have equalized their status, in his eyes, and provided him with a role that he could understand.
Roth presents himself as having been unable to escape Maggie: he was emotionally unequipped, in over his head. One of the reasons that he left Chicago in the spring of 1958 and headed for New York was to get away from her. He spent the summer, though, on his first trip to Europe, blissfully alone, taking in the literary sights of London and the prostitutes of Paris (also a first) and getting as far as Florence and Siena. In Paris, he received the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for “Epstein,” thanks to the backing of George Plimpton. The award was given at a party in the Bois de Boulogne—“All these Paris swells were there,” Roth says; “George knew them all”—where he accepted his check from no less a figure than Prince Aly Khan, best known for having been married to Rita Hayworth.
There was a dinner afterward at a Left Bank restaurant, where his biggest thrill of the evening came from sitting next to Irwin Shaw. “He’d fought in the war, and he’d written The Young Lions,” Roth says. “I was twenty-five, and he was a bestselling writer, and we hit it off, because he was a Brooklyn boy. Although he’d moved to Paris—he was a gourmand, he was a great skier—he was still a Brooklyn boy. He wasn’t a literary writer I’d come to love, but he was a real writer. And here he was talking common talk, to me: funny, lively, energetic, twenty years my senior, and giving me encouragement. I was flying!” There was also a French girl he’d met at the Café Odéon the night before and had invited to the party. She arrived on a motorcycle with a great roar. “It was like a Jacques Tati movie,” he recalls. “I invited Jacques Tati in drag to come to the Bois de Boulogne.”
As a parting gesture of goodwill to Maggie, however, and to squelch the guilt of leaving, Roth had helped her get a summer job in New York at Esquire, for precisely the months that he was away—a whole, safe ocean away. Unfortunately, she decided that she, too, would stay. She was standing on the pier, waving, when he got back. He tried to keep his distance, his perspective, his new and independent life. He rented a two-room basement apartment on East Tenth Street, supporting himself on part of the modest sum he had earned for Goodbye, Columbus. He didn’t have much to spare, but he didn’t need it. He lived on a tiny budget, alone, except for a cat he acquired that fall and named Allegra, after the gorgeously feline ballerina Alle
gra Kent. But, as it happened, Maggie wasn’t able to replace her summer job, or wasn’t able to hold the job that she got to replace it. And when she ran out of money, she showed up on his doorstep. It was a cold morning. She had her suitcase and nowhere else to go. He let her move in.
In The Facts, Roth offers sound reasons for his actions. There was a chance that she would stabilize herself if she got a new start in life; there was a chance that she would hurt herself if she didn’t. Above all, he says, he had been trained by his parents to seek solutions when a person needed help—even if that person had borrowed his spare typewriter and hocked it, claiming it had been stolen. (He found the pawn ticket in her pocket.) Even if that person claimed that his resistance to marriage must be a sign of his “latent homosexuality.” (Very latent.) Even if her presence turned his apartment into what he called “a psychiatric ward with café curtains.” Yet the reader’s faith in his reasoning becomes troubled when, detailing events that led up to their wedding some three months after she moved in, he falls back on the tortuously passive locution “She turned up pregnant.”
There had been a few encounters in the dark, he admits, unemotional and nearly anonymous. Still, at first, he suspected she was lying. She broke the news when he returned from a trip to Boston, where he had been checking the galleys for the publication of Goodbye, Columbus. She appeared to be jealous of the book—she’d been telling people that she was his editor—and afraid that with success he’d rise beyond her reach. But she submitted a urine sample to the local pharmacy for testing, and the result was positive. (Roth himself went to get the result and remembers being so stunned that he said to the pharmacist, “Positive that she isn’t pregnant? Or positive that she is?”) Now she was threatening to leave the baby on his parents’ doorstep if he didn’t marry her. This he found all too believable. And so, barely able to support himself, at twenty-five, he made a harsh and desperate but perhaps predictable counteroffer: he would marry her if she had an abortion right away. Which she did, or claimed to do, with three hundred dollars from his precipitously reduced bank account. She returned from the procedure in pain and no little anguish at what he’d forced her to endure, which may provide a small part of an explanation for why, in the most inexplicable turn of all, he kept his part of the bargain. They were married on February 22, 1959. They had the same wedding anniversary as his parents.
Roth asks himself the question point-blank, in The Facts: “Why didn’t I pick up then and run away, a free man? How could I still have stayed with her?” Instead of answering, however, he veers off toward the safely exalted ground of literature, and lays the blame on his having been a fledgling novelist in thrall to a bold if diabolical imagination: “The wanton scenes she improvised! The sheer hyperbole of what she imagined! The self-certainty unleashed by her own deceit!” In stripping him of his youthful certainties and his illusions, Maggie was nothing less than “the greatest creative-writing teacher of them all,” he concludes, the force that shook him free of the tiresome innocence of his early stories and the elegant probity of Henry James. How could he leave all that behind?
Roth may not have known exactly why he stayed, and even today he isn’t proud of the weakness that he feels his manipulability betrayed. He had been an embarrassingly good Jewish boy: “frightened of appearing heartless,” subject to “an overpowering, half-insane responsibility,” as he wrote in The Facts—or, in blunter language, “a sucker.” This isn’t a later rationale: these phrases reflect the same trapped and rueful sense of moral responsibility that pervades Letting Go. He still wonders how much of this conception of manly dutifulness he derived from his father—a man dedicated to fixing other people’s problems, other people’s lives. “That’s what I learned from my marriage,” Roth tells me today: “that I couldn’t fix everything.”
Of course, the marriage had dimensions that no later judgment or attempt at psychosexual diagnosis can comprehend. Not long after the wedding, Maggie converted to Judaism, an act that her new husband discouraged as “pointless” and self-abnegating, although he agreed to a second ceremony, at a Manhattan synagogue, with his parents present. (Roth enjoys repeating the advice that Maggie got from her grandmother—whom he liked—about marrying a Jewish man: “They’re short, ugly little fellas, but they’re good to their wives and children.”) Maggie was with him through the early rabbinical attacks; she was with him through the writing of Letting Go. He helped her win her children back from her first husband, and, for part of the time that he taught at the University of Iowa in the early sixties, he was a dedicated live-in father to her ten-year-old daughter, Holly. He was also dedicated—as a tutor, as an older friend—to her twelve-year-old son, David, who went to boarding school but stayed with them on holidays and sometimes through the summers.
Roth became especially close to Holly, a bright but much neglected child, who, he recalls, could not even tell time when she came into his life. One afternoon in January 1962, halfway through his second year in Iowa, after a particularly nasty “conflagration” with Maggie, he announced that he was leaving for good. Maggie threatened to kill herself, but he’d heard that before, and he left. Still, once out on the street, he says, he began to worry that she might be going through with it, and he went back—not because of Maggie, he insists, but because he couldn’t bear the thought that Holly “would get home from school and find her dead mother,” or, at least, an unholy mess. Indeed, Maggie had taken a mixture of pills and whiskey and passed out. He got her to the bathroom, where she vomited, and it was while she was still a little groggy that she told him, “I wasn’t pregnant in New York.”
The story got worse. To obtain a positive result on the pregnancy test, she had used a urine sample that she’d bought from a pregnant woman among the down-and-out in Tompkins Square Park, a few blocks from Roth’s apartment. There had been no abortion: she had gone to the movies instead. She’d seen Susan Hayward in I Want to Live! a couple of times and then come home crying about the pain and humiliation. All this she confessed, saying that she wanted to come clean to him before she died. Of course, there was the possibility that she was simply trying especially hard to hurt him and that the confession itself was a lie.
After that, he says, he slept in a separate room and told himself that he was staying on “to take care of Holly.” He also began having an affair with one of his students, a twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer. (She puts in an appearance a few years later as Karen Oakes, a bicycling coed with strawberry braids, in My Life as a Man, where the affair is the cause of the suicide attempt/confession and not a result of it. Is this significant? In his fiction, Roth tends to find self-incrimination far more interesting than innocence.) He was only twenty-nine himself, and romance soon won out over demi-parental obligation, when, later that spring, he asked his student-love to run away with him. As he reports the story now, she had the good sense to decline.
He backed out of his plans to spend the summer with Maggie and her children in a rented house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts; leaving the house there to them, he stayed at his friend William Styron’s house in Connecticut while the Styrons were away. He was greatly taken with a quotation by Flaubert that he found typed on an index card thumbtacked to the wall behind Styron’s desk, a line that he has cited in his work and still quotes with approval: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” When, that September, he started a new teaching job at Princeton, he and Maggie and Holly moved into their new house together, in a last-ditch attempt at a regular and orderly life. It wasn’t easy. Roth recalls that he and Maggie could fight about anything—how to pronounce the word “orange,” for example, Michigan style or Newark style—and that poor Holly would look back and forth at them as though she were watching a tennis match. He thinks that Maggie even became jealous of his rapport with Holly. That’s the only explanation for her telling him, out of the blue, that if he ever tried to seduce her daughter, she would kill him in his sleep with a kitc
hen knife. (There is a possibility that Maggie’s father had molested her. Roth says that she once told him this had happened, but she was speaking in anger and never repeated the charge; he still doesn’t know if it’s true.) That night, he says, he hid all the knives before he went to bed.
Letting Go, published in the spring of 1962, was dedicated “to Maggie.” By the end of the year, however, Roth had returned to New York from Princeton alone, in order to escape her yet again. Geographic distance seemed to be his only reliable strategy. She soon followed him to New York, but this time the separation stuck. Holly went off to spend a year at boarding school and then returned to live with her mother. Roth kept up with Holly by letter and then through occasional dates together, at least for a while, even when he and Maggie were at loggerheads. He recalls taking Holly to a Broadway show and being served by Maggie with a legal summons right there in his seat.
Still, he got away from her—physically, if not emotionally, and certainly not financially. She rejected all his efforts to divorce, and she seemed to have the legal system on her side in her quest to bleed him dry. He was far from free. But he was just turning thirty. He had everything before him. And being the kind of novelist that he is, he was now able to spend all his waking hours trying to imagine how Maggie had become what she was—desperate, infuriating, frightening, tragic—in his next book.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 5
