Desperate for what? To follow up on Portnoy? To escape from Portnoy? To reestablish writing as a practice unaligned with personal torment? Roth completed the manuscript during a stay at Yaddo, and the very next day he had an even more outlandish idea for a book: What if a man turned into a breast? It came partly from Kafka, of course, but also from the distinct sense that his Portnoy readers—even the ones who loved the book, or maybe especially those—viewed him as a “walking prick.” When they came up to him in the street, that’s what they saw, it seemed to him, that’s whom they were congratulating. It was disheartening, it was infuriating, and the inherent shame and self-disgust in the idea may cast a darker light on his baseball team of freaks and outcasts. But here was a way both of expressing what had happened to him and of turning it around. “It was like Henry Higgins,” Roth traces his line of thought today: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man? But in reverse.”
So a new protagonist, David Kepesh, professor of literature at Stony Brook—who has recently completed five years of psychotherapy to help him get over a Grand Guignol marriage, and who finally has a lovely girlfriend and any number of reasons to think he is coming into the clear—wakes up one morning to find that he has turned into a giant breast: six feet long, a hundred and fifty-five pounds, with an acutely sensitive five-inch rosy nipple. It’s a wonderful setup. And there’s some pungency in Kepesh’s anger at Gogol and Kafka for getting him into it. “Many other literature professors teach ‘The Nose’ and ‘Metamorphosis,’” his doctor argues. “But maybe,” Kepesh answers, “not with so much conviction.”
Unfortunately, Roth has nowhere to take it from there. Aside from some hints of deeper content in Kepesh’s pre-transformation waning of desire for his perfect girlfriend, and a father strong and loving enough to behave as though nothing untoward had taken place, the book suffers from the same absence of real characters and feelings as Our Gang and The Great American Novel. Roth, unlike Kafka, is not an abstract artist. His satire is most potent when—as with the Patimkins or Mrs. Portnoy—it is channeled through or obstructed by some warmth or contending emotion. The fact that the giant breast becomes obsessed with sex, and in a notably unmetamorphosed way (“Doctor, I want to fuck her! With my nipple!”), seems more a reaching into the old grab bag than a development of the book’s invention. The Breast is a very brief book—Roth wrote it in a few weeks—but it ends in exhaustion, with another writer doing the work, as Roth quotes in full Rilke’s poem on an archaic torso of Apollo, concluding, “You must change your life.” Roth had certainly changed Kepesh’s life and had also changed his own. But changing his work was harder.
None of these books of the early seventies—conscientiously grotesque, surreal, and often overwrought—did his reputation much good. “I wasn’t trying to alienate the huge audience I’d won with Portnoy,” he tells me, “but I didn’t mind if I did.” Pause. “And I guess I did.” Some critics took the books as a reflection of the anarchic and somewhat surreal times. But they were also a reflection of Roth’s post-Portnoy uncertainty and confusion. The Breast and The Great American Novel were published in reverse order of their writing, in 1972 and 1973, respectively. Roth had changed publishers, leaving Random House for Holt, Rinehart & Winston in order to work with the editor Aaron Asher, who was a close and much admired friend. It was Asher who thought The Breast seemed more nearly related to Portnoy and Our Gang and that this trajectory made more sense. What Asher was really waiting for, Roth says, was the big book he had promised next.
In April 1972, Roth, completing his transformation from a city boy, bought an eighteenth-century farmhouse in northwestern Connecticut and soon moved in there with Barbara Sproul. Forty acres, a small apple orchard, a few giant maples fronting the house, and a studio looking out over open fields: a setting for Chekhov rather than for any scene remotely associable with the Portnoys, or with the tormented book that he was finally able to complete there. My Life as a Man is the long-delayed work about his marriage. The difficulties he had in writing the story, the false starts, are carefully described by Roth’s stand-in writer-hero, Peter Tarnopol. And the evidence of these difficulties takes the ingenious form of two stories that Tarnopol himself has written, placed at the beginning of the book, using different voices and familial details—third person, first person, a brother here, a sister there—in the hope of sparking his imagination and getting the book done. Roth’s hero is well aware that others may not find the subject of his dreadful marriage as compelling as he does. His older sister writes to him, “Why don’t you plug up the well and drill for inspiration elsewhere? Do yourself a favor (if those words mean anything to you) and FORGET IT. Move on!” But he does not have a choice: “Obsessed, I was as incapable of not writing about what was killing me as I was of altering or understanding it.” Killing him still, though by the time My Life as a Man was published, in 1974, Maggie had been dead for six years.
No matter. As Tarnopol’s psychiatrist points out—the same Dr. Spielvogel who honed his listening skills on Alexander Portnoy—one may be released from a trap and yet still not be free. The only hope the writer has is to write everything down, in order to understand and, eventually, to overcome. So here is the story of Maggie—called Maureen Tarnopol in this book—borrowing his typewriter and his finding the pawn ticket for it in her pocket. Here is her lie about being pregnant, and here, at last, is the urine sample that she bought, the abortion that she did not have, and the Susan Hayward movie that she saw instead. Here is the alimony that he paid without an end in sight. And here is the psychiatrist who blamed Tarnopol’s “phallic threatening mother” for his susceptibility to such a marriage, arousing in him a blaze of anger toward his real and painfully perplexed mother, made more intense by memories of her occasional insults to his boyish pride—signs of nothing more, Tarnopol says he realizes now, than that she was not perfect. He is certain that the doctor’s characterization of his mother was entirely wrong, even if it was necessary, in psychiatric terms, to “deplete the fund of maternal veneration” that Maggie—or rather, Maureen—had been able to draw on. So here, rather discreetly placed some two hundred and twenty pages in, is both an explanation and an indirect apology for Sophie Portnoy.
My Life as a Man is perhaps most powerful today as a depiction of the force and the fallacies of psychoanalysis in America, at the height of its influence. In conversation, Roth looks back on his own analysis as having been, in many ways, a kind of “brainwashing.” “Like the North Koreans,” he only half jokes, “the psychiatrist would torture you and torture you with his false interpretations, and when he stopped you were so grateful that you just accepted them.” Freud was undoubtedly a genius, but the idea of translating his ideas into this kind of therapy was “outlandish,” because it “stamped everyone with the same story.” The story is about responsibility and guilt—guilt for your suffering, guilt even for your unconscious fantasies, which are the same unconscious fantasies that everyone is assumed to have. Roth mentions the female patients whom Freud accused of fantasizing the childhood abuse that they had actually suffered. The real problem with Freud, Roth concludes, is that “he wasn’t a good novelist. He didn’t pay enough attention to individual difference, to the details.”
Tarnopol’s new anger at his mother may serve a psychiatric purpose, but it does nothing to abate the old anger at his wife, which erupts in a hideous explosion. In one of the final scenes between the miserable pair, Maureen’s promise to talk about divorce turns out to be just another trick; she has come to his apartment, instead, to read him a story she has written about him. “Two can play,” she tells him, “at this kind of slander.” And when she refuses to leave, throwing herself to the floor and grabbing on to a chair, he smacks the crap out of her. Literally and disgustingly: blood and shit are soon everywhere, all over the room. The smell is awful. And still, he admits he’s having a good time, threatening to kill her even as he knows he won’t. It’s a shockingly violent scene, considering that this is Roth and not Norman
Mailer. (“By the way,” Roth says to me one day, without my having asked, “I never did that.”) Afterward, Tarnopol, being a Roth protagonist and ever a good boy beneath the bad, helps her telephone her lawyer; he’s in even bigger trouble than before. The book has a sudden denouement, when Maureen, like her real-life counterpart, dies in a car crash. But even that fate is not enough to satisfy Tarnopol. “Why isn’t there a devil and damnation?” the unmerry widower rails at her ghost. “Oh, if I were Dante,” he swears, weighing one more literary option, “I’d go about writing this another way!”
For obvious reasons, this book marked the start of Roth’s big trouble with women, in the literary sense. Even Peter Tarnopol, examining his output, worries that he is “turning art into a chamberpot for hatred,” semi-quoting his idol, Flaubert. A couple of years after the book was published, in December 1976, a cover story by Vivian Gornick in The Village Voice featured photographs of Roth, Bellow, Mailer, and Henry Miller—“like big Wanted posters,” Roth recalls—under the headline “Why Do These Men Hate Women?” Gornick, a frontline feminist and an impassioned critic, was not calling them bad writers (except, sometimes, and with adequate quotations, Mailer) and was far from immune to the power and beauty of their finer work. She was almost over the top in her admiration for the stories of Goodbye, Columbus (“brilliant and deeply moving … filled with character, wisdom, and a luminous sense of the quest for a moral, feeling life … everything Tolstoy said a book should be”) and warmly sympathetic toward Portnoy’s Complaint (“a work so full of wonderful human dishevelment, a work so clearly about panic rather than driven by it, that we could not but laugh and anguish together with the dubious Portnoy”). If it were not for My Life as a Man, Roth would clearly not have made her list. As Gornick puts it, not without reason, the problems with the women in Portnoy were Portnoy’s problems; the problems with the women—or, as she might better have said, the woman—in My Life as a Man were the author’s. She was not the only critic to classify the book as therapy rather than fiction.
My Life as a Man is a work of tremendous humor, colloquial verve, and formal playfulness, with Tarnopol’s two “short stories”—which introduce his own fictional protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman—set against a longer “factual” section titled “My True Story.” Yet there is something uneasy and impacted at its core: a sense of confinement, and—despite the technical displays—a lack of freedom. Roth at last returns to a cast of living, breathing characters but keeps them at the perimeter of the central marriage, in the form of ricocheting voices. There is Tarnopol’s sister, Joan, a wholly self-created woman (through electrolysis as well as education), who is happy in her marriage, her children, and her skin. (She is safe from any attempts by her brother to include her in his writing, she tells him, because “you can’t make pleasure credible. And a working marriage that works is about as congenial to your talent and interests as the subject of outer space.”) There is the rather wise if wrongheaded psychiatrist, Dr. Spielvogel, always available for emergency advice and consistently amenable. (“If you are incarcerated,” he assures Tarnopol after the beating, “I will try my best to get someone to take over your hours.”) And there is a Brenda Patimkin redux named Sharon Shatzky, young and bold and gaily sensual, whose virtues—“character, intelligence, and imagination”—Tarnopol does not realize until too late, after he has thrown her over for Maureen.
Maureen. What does it mean for a writer to put someone he considers a psychopath at the center of a novel? The problem with My Life as a Man is not that Maureen is deluded, scheming, and sometimes vicious but that her husband’s day-and-night obsession with her delusions, her schemes, and her viciousness sucks the air out of the book, thins its texture, and makes it slack with repetition. The reader sometimes feels as Tarnopol does while writing, “trying to punch my way out of a paper bag.” Maureen is a villain, but she’s not uninteresting: she apparently scratched her way out of a bleak and intolerant white-trash family, she has a flashy former husband, a bit of glamour still, and she can be a witty as well as a fierce opponent. Speaking from the dead—where Tarnopol has dispatched his stories for her to read—she retitles his book My Martyrdom as a Man, which is not at all unapt. (It’s typical of Roth to give the enemy the best lines.) She is in forward motion, however frenzied. Tarnopol, on the other hand, seems merely a dullish Portnoy, complaining of his Gentile wife instead of his Jewish mother, “I can’t take any more.” No matter how he tries to transform this story into art, he admits, there is “emblazoned across the face of the narrative, in blood: HOW COULD SHE? TO ME!” Tarnopol, all too clearly, is spinning his wheels. And despite the book’s formal inventiveness and its gleaming comic bits, so was Roth.
In the mid-seventies, the worrying question asked about Maureen was not the usual one asked about a character in a novel: Is she credible? (In fact, some thought she failed that basic test; Morris Dickstein, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote that Maureen “might as well be a creature from Mars.”) The looming question now was: Is she representative? Is she merely a woman or is she Woman? Gornick, for one, had no doubt about the answer. The force of her conviction even led her to misrepresent Tarnopol’s beating of Maureen, already ugly enough, as the scene in which “the wife is being beaten to death,” and to deduce from this that “Roth is clearly saying this repellent creature—and all those who resemble her—deserves to die.” There’s quite a jump between those little dashes. Gornick can be a close and astute reader; the misrepresentation suggests that her anger with the scene, perhaps with the entire book, short-circuited her critical faculties. The vituperativeness of the rest of her comments (“dehumanizing vileness”; “disintegrating moral intelligence”; “unacknowledged misogyny” that “leaks like a slow, inky poison”) seems as extreme as her praise of Roth’s earlier work. (Gornick’s judgment has grown even more extreme with the years. In an essay in The Men in My Life, of 2008, she theorizes that both Roth and Bellow displace a Jewish anger against Gentiles onto women, and sweepingly condemns Roth’s post-Portnoy body of work: “In all the books to follow over the next thirty years, the women are monstrous because for Philip Roth women are monstrous.”) There were other critics, including Dickstein, who thought My Life as a Man showed problems with women, although Dickstein went on to suggest that Roth’s quarrel was with people in general. But the word “misogyny” stuck.
Roth’s hero had been at pains to make it clear that he did not hate women. He just hated the woman he had married. And with good reason. When his harshest critic of all, Dr. Spielvogel, accuses him of “reducing all women to masturbatory sexual objects”—there is no criticism that Roth himself does not anticipate—Tarnopol offers an anguished refutation, invoking in his defense a series of tender love affairs and explaining that, had Maureen been merely an “object” to him, he would never have married her. “Don’t you see,” he cries, “it isn’t that women mean too little to me—what’s caused the trouble is that they mean so much. The testing ground, not for potency, but virtue! Believe me, if I’d listened to my prick instead of to my upper organs, I would never have gotten into this mess to begin with!”
It’s clear why critics were able to label the novel “therapy” without knowing much of Roth’s private life. Tarnopol’s cry is identical to Roth’s own later explanation, in The Facts, of the moral and emotional ties behind his real-life marriage. There will be skeptics here, too, of course. Maggie Martinson Williams Roth had no more chance to present her point of view than do her fictional stand-ins. It is easy to imagine a silent woman as a woman maligned—a victim of what Maureen Tarnopol calls “this kind of slander”—and one searches for an objective scrap about Maggie’s life and temperament, something to juxtapose to Roth’s disturbing portraits. An interview with her son, David Williams, was published in the St. Louis Jewish Light in 1975, when he was twenty-seven, working in St. Louis as a trucker but hoping to switch to anti-poverty work. Approached by a reporter who had figured out his relation to the famous writer, Williams agreea
bly submitted to a number of questions. The answers, however, are not redeeming. “Mother was not only a very sexy-looking woman and an intelligent person,” he said. “She was also very destructive. She tried to destroy everyone in her path.” Even so, he says, “Philip would defend Mother to me when I criticized her.”
As for “Philip,” whom Williams had not seen in many years, he recalled that he had helped him get into a good boarding school and had helped to prepare him for it. Tutoring him in literature, Philip had selected books that he “literally forced me to read”—he mentions The Red Badge of Courage and Fail-Safe—and had discussed them with him at the kitchen table, “until he was satisfied that I comprehended the author’s real reason for writing the book.” He also “arranged to have me tutored in math and grammar,” Williams continued, “but Philip himself was my main tutor.” There were other subjects, too: “On masturbation,” Williams says, “Philip quoted this Harvard dude who said that 98 percent of everyone masturbates and the other two percent lie.” Williams acknowledged that he had been a pretty wild kid—“that’s the only way I knew how to survive”—and “I’ve got to say that if it were not for the positive influence Philip had on my life at that time, I might be in jail today.”
Yet, in some ways, Roth was not writing about a single woman. Even in this very hyperbolic novel, in which Tarnopol admits that any generalization he makes might well be viewed as “an unfortunate consequence of my own horrific marriage,” he cannot help noting that his experiences were related to a wider social malaise. The expectation for fulfillment in marriage and only in marriage that had characterized American women of the fifties—the era of the Tarnopols’ (and the Roths’) wedding vows—was based on notions of “female dependence, defenselessness, and vulnerability,” and abetted by the equally distorting “myth of male inviolability.” No surprise that the result, for many women, was resentment. Maureen Tarnopol enjoyed her husband’s literary success but also despised him for it. “Vicariousness was her nemesis: what she got through men was all she got.” My Life as a Man is marked by its own resentment and sexual biliousness, but—as with When She Was Good—the author’s underlying arguments are far from inimical to women, or to feminism. Tarnopol’s case against what he calls “the Prince Charming phenomenon” makes him sound remarkably like Vivian Gornick.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 10
