A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis
When She Was Good took five years to appear, accounting for the single longest gap in Roth’s productivity—from 1962 to 1967—during the fifty-plus years of his career. For some time he couldn’t write at all, being “imaginatively paralyzed,” as he puts it, by his marital troubles. But he says that even without these troubles he might well have been confused about what to do, after the critical letdown of Letting Go. He finally began writing a book that he intended to call The Jewboy, about his early years, written in a semi-mythological, Malamud-like (“Malamuddy,” he says with a laugh and the emphasis on “muddy”) vein. “But I didn’t know how to control a non-realistic book,” he says, explaining why he left it unfinished. “If anything goes, anything goes. How do you control it?”
And he had Maggie too much on the brain, particularly the trick of the urine specimen. “I was haunted by that,” he says. “Just haunted by it,” he repeats, shaking his head: “It had taken me out of my young life, taken my strength, my promise, my industry … my everything—and that’s what it had been about.” Next, he wrote a play designed specifically to include the story of the phony pregnancy. The title was The Nice Jewish Boy, and although he completed it, and it was rehearsed at the American Place Theatre, in 1964, with the leading role played by a not yet discovered Dustin Hoffman, he decided that it was no good and called off a scheduled staged reading. “I had a live grenade in my hand,” Roth says of Maggie’s deception and what it meant to him. “But I didn’t know how to use it.”
In life, he was moving on: dating, making a new circle of friends, visiting Israel for the first time, teaching at Stony Brook and then at the University of Pennsylvania. He enjoyed teaching, but it was also an economic necessity. Roth had won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for Goodbye, Columbus, a prize that brought his full payment for the book to seventy-five hundred dollars. For his next book, he followed William Styron’s advice and moved to Random House, where he earned more money; but even so, his twenty-thousand-dollar advance for Letting Go had to be parceled out over the three years that it took him to complete the book. Roth recalls that his publisher, Bennett Cerf, was very kind to him when he was getting his footing in New York, after leaving Maggie, and invited him to glamorous evenings where he met Truman Capote, Frank Sinatra, Claudette Colbert, and, as excitingly, Martin Gabel, the former radio star who had narrated On a Note of Triumph.
In late 1964, Roth very briefly dated Jackie Kennedy. They met at a party and talked a long time (“she was smart”), but he was too intimidated—and, he adds, he lacked the proper wardrobe—to keep the relationship going. Invited to be her escort at a second dinner party, he went out and bought a new suit and a pair of black shoes. (“I was nervous. I’m left handed and they serve from the right. What if I dropped something on her?”) Taking her home from the dinner, in her long black limo with the Secret Service guy up front—he had expected to hail a cab—he remembers thinking, “Am I supposed to kiss her? I know all about Lee Harvey Oswald, am I supposed to kiss her? What about the Cuban missile crisis, am I supposed to kiss her?” And he remembers her asking, when they got to her building on Fifth Avenue, “Do you want to come upstairs? Oh, of course you do”—the only sign she gave, he says, that she knew exactly who she was. Upstairs, she told him the children were asleep, prompting more inner turmoil on his part: “You mean the little boy who salutes like this and the little girl who calls her pony Macaroni?” When he finally kissed her, it was like kissing the face on a billboard. There wasn’t much more to their acquaintance than that, he says—they saw each other only two or three times—although he “would have loved it if she could have been the corespondent in Maggie’s lawsuit.”
By this time he had met (at Bennett Cerf’s) the woman who became his girlfriend for the next several years, Ann Mudge. She was a beauty who was in quiet rebellion against a wealthy, conservative background—and Roth, at eighty, looks back on her as one of the loves of his life. A calm and gentle woman, Ann was the antithesis of Maggie and in some ways the antidote to her. All the two women had in common, Roth notes in The Facts (where Ann is called May), was their Protestant blondness and their adversarial relation to the privileged world that their looks seemed to represent. For Ann, despite her wealth, had suffered an emotionally harsh upbringing and, like Maggie, bore “the scars of wounds inflicted” by it. She had left college without graduating; in New York, she had done some modeling and some interior decorating—not the most fulfilling work that she felt she could do. Once again, there was a healing role that he could play—he soon encouraged her to return to school—even as she helped him to heal his own wounds and regain his equanimity.
But healing takes time, and what he needed to write about in these years was Maggie. In 1965, he began a novel meant to include the purchased urine sample, but he found that he still couldn’t bear to contemplate the marriage. Instead, he decided to use the stories that Maggie had told him about her upbringing, along with his own experiences of the people he’d met and the places he’d seen during visits to her family: to examine Maggie’s roots in the thirties, Maggie growing up in the forties, and, especially, Maggie coming to young womanhood in the early fifties. Unable to confront the full force of the woman as he’d known her, he determined to write about the girl he hadn’t known. But even after he settled down to work, the book went through many, many versions. Cartons of manuscripts piled up, and he feared for a while that he would never be able to get through the story. He wrote a good deal of it while staying at the upstate New York writers’ colony, Yaddo, and his deep loyalty to the place originates with the fact that When She Was Good was finally finished there, “after years of misery.”
When She Was Good is a work as harsh and plain as the world that Roth depicts. The book contains few jokes, no Jews, none of the easy banter of Goodbye, Columbus or any other sign that it was written by the author he had promised to be. This self-suppression marked a painstaking adaptation of style to subject. Roth was no longer standing outside the “Americans” he’d been observing since leaving home; he was burrowing within them, even if only to discover a resistance to admitting depths. The principal male character, raised in the upright town that Roth calls Liberty Center, in an unspecified midwestern state, can’t come any closer to cursing, even in his thoughts, than “that g.d. bed” or, about a girl he likes—a high school cheerleader—that she is “built, as the saying goes, like a brick s. house.” The cheerleader herself is subject to rumors about whether she will “‘spread,’ as the saying goes, on the very first date.” It’s a world of clichés, repression, and petty scandal, and Roth adheres unblinkingly to its limitations—for better and worse, in a remarkable if sometimes costly literary feat. Roth says today that the book “might have been written by Sherwood Anderson,” and takes satisfaction in having pulled it off. At the time, several critics assumed it to be a willed display of authorial range, seizing on a geographical (and emotional) realm too far from Roth’s experience for him to get a proper grip. But When She Was Good is an obsessive work, deeply personal if strictly disciplined, about the destruction of the soul of the woman he felt had nearly destroyed him.
Roth’s heroine, Lucy Nelson, is an ambitious small-town girl who dreams of a bigger, better life but goes terribly wrong along the way. An alcoholic father, a weak and ineffectual mother, a blundering boy who impregnates her at eighteen and, worse, marries her: all are responsible, as she sees it, for the shabbiness and disappointment of her life. And, in part, she’s right. Despite the harshness of Lucy’s judgments and her growing debasement, this is a sensitive account, powered by Roth’s attempt to understand “the suffering,” as he puts it now, “behind the anger.” The hazards and constrictions of a young woman’s life, circa 1950, are presented with chilling, Dreiserian reality: an eight-page seduction, part wheedling and part bullying, in which Lucy’s boyfriend talks her into the backseat of his car and gets her pregnant; the condescending rebuff of the college-tow
n doctor whom she begs to give her an abortion. In the broader view, Roth lets us see the disparity between the flawed human beings who surround Lucy and the monsters she imagines them to be, although the damage inflicted on her is so severe that the difference hardly matters.
Increasingly isolated, resentful, raging, Lucy is an incubus but also a product, a character of immense but curdled strengths. Reviews of the book often depended on what the critic thought of her, and the range extended from “one of those great literary portraits, like Emma Bovary or Becky Sharp” (Josh Greenfield, The Village Voice) to “hysterical” and “a full-blown bitch” (Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review). The darker view reflects the consensus of virtually all the book’s other characters; by the end, even Lucy’s two-year-old son can’t bear her. Although female critics at the time raised no objections to Lucy’s portrayal (both Doris Grumbach and Maureen Howard found her all too real), Roth’s reputation among feminists fell so low during the next couple of decades that her story was swept up in a kind of retroactive anger. In an interview with Roth in The Paris Review in 1984, Hermione Lee explained that “the feminist attack” on his work was based, in part, on the fact “that the female characters are unsympathetically treated, for instance that Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good is hostilely presented.” Roth, responding somewhat defensively, contended that Lucy could be seen as “a case of premature feminist rage,” and the claim is not without its merits. In a reconsideration of the book in The Huffington Post in 2010, Karen Stabiner set out all her feminist credentials while daring to declare that Lucy Nelson is “a fledgling and tragically failed feminist,” and wagered that if readers came to When She Was Good without knowing who had written it they would assume that the author was a woman.
It’s a dangerous thing to give birth to a writer—Roth likes to quote Czesław Miłosz, saying that “when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished”—and dangerous sometimes even to be a friend. (See the stories that Henry James and Edith Wharton wrote about each other.) But, pace Saul Bellow, there are special risks to one’s eternal good name in marrying one. With Lucy reduced to a state of permanent outrage, When She Was Good concludes in a spectacular act of exorcism. After driving everyone away, Lucy wanders off on a freezing winter’s night, more than half-deranged: “Farewell, farewell, philanderers and frauds, cowards and weaklings, cheaters and liars. Fathers and husbands, farewell!” Her body is discovered three nights later, under layers of ice and snow. It is a brazenly melodramatic stroke, compounded by the grisly irony that the discovery is made by a high school couple who have parked in the local lovers’ lane, where Lucy first got into trouble, and who hit the frozen body with the shovel they are using to dig out the car. By this point in the story, her death is a huge relief—for the reader and, apparently, for the author. The book comes as close as a realistic novel can to driving a stake through its heroine’s heart.
The reality of escaping Maggie was much harder. In early 1963, Roth obtained a legal separation, but only on condition that he provide her with a weekly sum of one hundred and fifty dollars, amounting to roughly half his annual income—an arrangement that was to continue until she chose to remarry or, more likely, given her preferences, for the rest of his life. Their marriage was childless and had lasted less than four years. She was thirty-three and able-bodied. He was twenty-nine, and his two published books had earned more praise than money. (Roth remembers that the judge who awarded the alimony asked how long it took him to write a book and that he replied, “Two or three years.” The judge responded, “Can’t you write any faster?”) Even undivided his income was meager, and he was already borrowing money to pay for psychoanalysis, which he felt he urgently needed to control the resentment and rage that were now his.
Roth’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hans Kleinschmidt, was a German-born Jew who had fled the Nazis in 1933, completed medical school in Italy, gone to Jerusalem in 1939, and, finally, immigrated to the United States in 1946. His field of special study was creativity, and he was known for treating artists and writers; Roth half jokes that his National Book Award got him a break on the rates. Roth began seeing him in the fall of 1962, traveling to New York from Princeton several times a week, and continued for about five years, a term that included significant gaps when he went off to Yaddo or spent summers away from the city. The psychiatrist may be credited with helping him make the final break from Maggie. Following a particularly horrendous fight, Roth recalls, he called Kleinschmidt and said that he had to see him that evening. After the session, Roth checked into a New York hotel—a room on an air shaft, at an “academic rate”—and never went home again except to collect his clothes. But Maggie remained the focus of his time in therapy; just talking out his fury at the deception of the urine sample required many months. His goal, he says, was to become “someone who would never be tricked like that again.”
The doctor-patient relationship was not always smooth, however, since Kleinschmidt tended to invoke broad Freudian constructs (the “phallic threatening mother,” the weak father), and Roth was certain that these abstractions did not apply to his family. “Why do you resist me?” Roth croons in a heavy German accent, mimicking his psychiatrist. Then, playing himself, several decibels louder: “Why do you resist me!” Yet it seems possible, at the time, some doubt was introduced—that the psychiatrist was able to rouse feelings of anger in Roth toward his mother and to draw up memories that justified them. The anger served a purpose, in both an emotional and a literary sense, as Roth makes clear in the later books Portnoy’s Complaint and My Life as a Man. It wasn’t long before Roth came to believe that this anger was unwarranted and wholly unfair, but by then the feelings and memories had done their work.
And while Roth admired Kleinschmidt in many ways, he had proof that the good doctor could be stunningly wrong. In the fall of 1967, Roth was experiencing a strange sense of weakness—“a general malaise,” he says, “the feeling that something was wrong, sometimes nausea.” One evening, he went off to a party at the 21 Club for the publication of William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. Once there, he began to feel worse and became so dizzy that he could hardly stand. The next day, at his session, the psychiatrist assured him that he was suffering from envy. Roth protested that he thought Styron’s book a masterpiece (he still does), that Styron was a friend and he wished him well, and then he asked—his trump card—why had he felt sick even before the party? “Because you were anticipating the envy,” was the reply. Later that day, Roth felt so ill that he went to a hospital, where a doctor pressed down on his abdomen—“I shot up toward the ceiling in pain!”—and discovered that his appendix had ruptured and his stomach was filled with pus. He required immediate surgery. Two of Roth’s uncles, his father’s brothers, had died of peritonitis from a burst appendix, and Herman Roth had almost died of it, too, in 1944. For Roth, it was touch and go; he was in the hospital for a month. But in the end he felt that he had not only cheated death but saved his good opinion of himself.
He also discovered, around the same time, that Kleinschmidt had written him up in a psychoanalytic journal, American Imago, in an article titled “The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity.” His name was omitted, his profession slightly altered, but there he was, psychically naked, in his psychiatrist’s baleful view: a man who suffered “castration anxiety vis-à-vis a phallic mother figure,” who as a child had fantasized “that his teachers were really his mother in disguise,” and who recalled a particularly awful occasion when he was eleven and his request for a bathing suit with a jockstrap was dismissed by his mother, in the presence of a saleslady, with the words “You don’t need one. You have such a little one that it makes no difference.” Furious with the psychiatrist, Roth, already down to just one or two sessions a week, thought of ending the analysis entirely. But he was getting too much from it, and in more ways than he had expected when he began.
These were the years when he was unable to write and finally produced the novel abou
t Maggie’s life (and death) that seems to have functioned as an imaginative adjunct to analysis. The analytic process, however, was also bringing new ideas to the fore: ideas about freedom, about breaking the constraints of good-Jewish-boyism that had bound him to the wheel of his marriage, and about breaking the constraints of literary propriety that had shaped both Letting Go and When She Was Good. Most critics yawned over When She Was Good when it was published, in 1967, and Roth’s reputation seemed to be going downhill with everything else. But they snapped to attention when, that same year, excerpts from the raucous psychoanalytic whatever-it-was that he had in progress began to appear: “A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis” in Esquire, in April; the instantly notorious “Whacking Off” in the unlikely intellectual bastion of Partisan Review, in August; and “The Jewish Blues,” just one month later, in Ted Solotaroff’s bold new publication, New American Review. We were not in the Midwest anymore.
By the spring of 1968, when a fourth chapter of the new work appeared, it was clear that something big was on the way. Roth was deeply involved with Ann Mudge by now, he was engaged in the anti-war movement—Mudge herself counseled draft-age men on their rights at a church in the Village—and he was writing at an unprecedented level of energy. Although the new book was still incomplete, signs of its impending success had already inspired Maggie to take him to court to demand more money, not for the first time. And then, one morning as he sat down to work, he received a telephone call from Holly, telling him that Maggie was dead.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 6
