My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

  “I still don’t know which was more deranged,” said Lydia, “pretending that that poor bewildered Santa Claus was my father, or imagining that the oaf I was about to marry was a man.”

  Incest, the violent marriage, then what she called her “flirtation” with madness. A month after Lydia had divorced Ketterer on grounds of physical cruelty, her mother finally managed to have the stroke she had been readying herself for all her life. During the week the woman lay under the oxygen tent in the hospital, Lydia refused to visit her. “I told my aunts that I had put in all the hours I owed to the cause. If she were dying, what help could I be in preventing it? And if she were faking again, I refused to participate.” And when the mother did expire at long last, Lydia’s grief, or relief, or delight, or guilt, took the form of torpor. Nothing seemed worth bothering to do. She fed and clothed Monica, her six-year-old daughter, but that was as far as she went. She did not change her own clothes, make the bed, or wash the dishes; when she opened a can to eat something she invariably discovered that she was eating the cat’s tinned food. Then she began to write on the walls with her lipstick. The Sunday after the funeral, when Ketterer came to take Monica away for the day, he found the child in a chair, all dressed and ready to go, and the walls of the apartment covered with questions, printed in big block letters with a lipstick: WHY NOT? YOU TOO? WHY SHOULD THEY? SAYS WHO? WE WILL? Lydia was still at her breakfast, which consisted that morning of a bowl full of kitty litter, covered with urine and a sliced candle.

  “Oh, how he loved that,” Lydia told me. “You could just see his mind, or whatever you’d call what he’s got in there, turning over. He couldn’t bear, you see, that I had divorced him, he couldn’t bear that a judge in a courtroom had heard what a brute he was. He couldn’t bear losing his little punching bag. ‘You think you’re so smart, you go to art museums and you think that gives you a right to boss your husband around—’ and then he’d pick me up and throw me at the wall. He was always telling me how I ought to be down on my knees for saving me from the houseful of old biddies, how I ought to worship him for taking somebody who was practically an orphan and giving her a nice home and a baby and money to spend going to art museums. Once, you see, during the seven years, I had gone off to the Art Institute with my cousin Bob, the bachelor high-school teacher. He took me to the art museum and when we were all alone in one of the empty rooms, he exposed himself to me. He said he just wanted me to look at him, that was all. He said he didn’t want me to touch it. So I didn’t; I didn’t do anything. Just like with my father—I felt sorry for him. There I was, married to an ape, and here was Cousin Bob, the one my father used to call ‘the little grind.’ Quite a distinguished family I come from. Anyway: Ketterer broke down the door, saw the handwriting on the wall was mine, and couldn’t have been happier. Especially when he noticed what I was pretending to be eating for my breakfast. Because it was all pretense, you see. I knew exactly what I was doing. I had no intention of drinking my own urine, or eating a candle and kitty litter. I knew he was coming to call, that was the reason I did it. You should have heard how solicitous he was: ‘You need a doctor, Lydia, you need a doctor real bad.’ But what he called was a city ambulance. I had to smile when two men came into my apartment actually wearing white coats. I didn’t have to smile, that is, but I did. I said: ‘Won’t you gentlemen have some kitty litter?’ I knew that was the kind of thing you were supposed to say if you were mad. Or at least that’s what everybody else drought. What I really say when I’m insane are things like ‘Today is Tuesday,’ or ‘I’ll have a pound of chopped meat, please.’ Oh, that’s just cleverness. Strike that. I don’t know what I say if I’m mad, or if I’ve even been mad. Truly, it was just a mild flirtation.”

  But that was the end of motherhood, nonetheless. Upon her release from the hospital five weeks later, Ketterer announced that he was remarrying. He hadn’t planned on “popping the question” so soon, but now that Lydia had proved herself in public to be the nut he had had to endure in private for seven miserable years, he felt duty bound to provide the child with a proper home and a proper mother. And if she wanted to contest his decision in court, well, just let her try. It seemed he had taken photographs of the walls she had defaced and had lined up neighbors who would testify to what she had looked like and smelted like in the week before “you flipped your Lydia, kid,” as it pleased Ketterer to describe what had happened to her. He did not care how much it would cost him in legal fees; he would spend every dime he had to save Monica from a crazy woman who ate her own filth. “And also,” said Lydia, “to get out of paying support money in the bargain.”

  “I ran around frantically for days, begging the neighbors not to testify against me. They knew how much Monica loved me, they knew that I loved her—they knew it was only because my mother had died, because I was exhausted, and so on and so forth. I’m sure I terrified them, telling them all they ‘knew’ that they didn’t begin to know about my life. I’m sure I wanted to terrify them. I even hired a lawyer. I sat in his office and wept, and he assured me that I was within my rights to demand the child back, and that it was going to be a little harder for Mr. Ketterer than he thought, and so on and so forth, very encouraging, very sympathetic, very optimistic. So I left his office and walked to the bus station and took a bus to Canada. I went to Winnipeg to look for an employment agency—I wanted to be a cook in a logging camp. The farther north the better. I wanted to be a cook for a hundred strong, hungry men. All the way to Winnipeg in the bus I had visions of myself in the kitchen of a big mess hall up in the freezing wilds, cooking bacon and eggs and biscuits and pots and pots of coffee for the morning meal, cooking their breakfast while it was still dark—the only one awake in the logging camp, me. And then the long sunny mornings, cleaning up and beginning preparations for the evening meal, when they’d all come in tired from the heavy work in the forest. It was the simplest and most girlish little daydream you can imagine. I could imagine. I would be a servant to a hundred strong men, and they in return would protect me from harm. I would be the only woman in the entire camp, and because there was only one of me, no one would ever dare to take advantage of my situation. I stayed in Winnipeg three days. Going to movies. I was afraid to go to a logging camp and say I wanted work there—I was sure they would think I was a prostitute. Oh, how banal to be crazy. Or maybe just banal being me. What could be more banal than having been seduced by your own father and then going around being ‘scarred’ by it forever? You see, I kept thinking all the while, ‘There’s no need for me to be behaving in this way. There is no need to be acting crazy—and there never was. There is no need to be running away to the North Pole. I’m just pretending. All I have to do to stop is to stop.’ I would remember my aunts telling me, if I so much as uttered a whimper in objection to anything: ‘Pull yourself together, Lydia, mind over matter.’ Well, it couldn’t be that I was going to waste my life defying those two, could it? Because making myself their victim was sillier even than continuing to allow myself to be my father’s. There I sat in the movies in Canada, with all these expressions I used to hate so, going through my head, hut making perfect sense. Pull yourself together, Lydia. Mind over matter, Lydia. You can’t cry over spilled milk, Lydia. If you don’t succeed, Lydia—and you don’t—try, try again. Nothing could have been clearer to me than that sitting in the movies in Winnipeg was as senseless as anything I could do if I ever hoped to save Monica from her father. I could only conclude that I didn’t want to save her from him. Dr. Rutherford now tells me that that was exactly the case. Not that it requires a trained therapist to see through somebody like me. How did I get back to Chicago? According to Dr. Rutherford, by accomplishing what I set out to do. I was staying in a two-dollar-a-night hotel on what turned out to be Winnipeg’s skid row. As if Lydia didn’t know, says Dr. Rutherford. The third morning that I came down to pay for the room, the desk clerk asked me if I wanted to pick up some easy cash. I could make a lot of money posing for pictures, especially if I was blonde a
ll over. I began to howl. He called a policeman, and the policeman called a doctor, and eventually somehow they got me home. And that’s how I managed to rid myself of my daughter. You would have thought it would have been simpler to drown her in the bathtub.”

  To say that I was drawn to her story because it was so lurid is only the half of it: there was the way the tale was told. Lydia’s easy, familiar, even cozy manner with misery, her droll acceptance of her own madness, greatly increased the story’s appeal—or, to put it another way, did much to calm whatever fears one might expect an inexperienced young man of a conventional background to have about a woman bearing such a ravaged past. Who would call “crazy” a woman who spoke with such detachment of her history of craziness? Who could find evidence of impulses toward suicide and homicide in a rhetorical style so untainted by rage or vengeful wrath? No, no, this was someone who had experienced her experience, who had been deepened by all that misery. A decidedly ordinary looking person, a pretty little American blonde with a face like a million others, she had, without benefit of books or teachers, mobilized every ounce of her intelligence to produce a kind of wisdom about herself. For surely it required wisdom to recite, calmly and with a mild, even forgiving irony, such a ghastly narrative of ill luck and injustice. You had to be as cruelly simpleminded as Ketterer himself, I thought, not to appreciate the moral triumph this represented—or else you just had to be someone other than me.

  I met the woman with whom I was to ruin my life only a few months after arriving back in Chicago in the fall of 1956, following a premature discharge from the army. I was just short of twenty-four, held a master’s degree in literature, and prior to my induction into the service had been invited to return to the College after my discharge as an instructor in the English composition program. Under any circumstances my parents would have been thrilled by what they took to be the eminence of that position; as it was, they looked upon this “honor” as something like divine compensation for the fate that had befallen their daughter. Their letters were addressed, without irony, to “Professor Nathan Zuckerman”; I’m sure many of them, containing no more than a line or two about the weather in New Jersey, were mailed solely for the sake of addressing them.

  I was pleased myself, though not so awestruck. In fact, the example of my own tireless and resolute parents had so instilled in me the habits that make for success that I had hardly any understanding at all of failure. Why did people fail? In college, 1 had looked with awe upon those fellows who came to class unprepared for examinations and who did not submit their assignments on time. Now why should they want to do it that way, I wondered. Why would anyone prefer the ignobility of defeat to the genuine pleasures of achievement? Especially as the latter was so easy to effectuate: all you had to be was attentive, methodical, thorough, punctual, and persevering; all you had to be was orderly, patient, self-disciplined, undiscourageable, and industrious—and, of course, intelligent. And that was it. What could be simpler?

  What confidence I had in those days! What willpower and energy! And what a devourer of schedules and routines! I rose every weekday at six forty-five to don an old knit swimsuit and do thirty minutes of pushups, sit-ups, deep knee bends, and half a dozen other exercises illustrated in a physical-fitness guide that I had owned since adolescence and which still served its purpose; of World War Two vintage, it was tided How To Be Tough as a Marine. By eight I would have bicycled the mile to my office overlooking the Midway. There I would make a quick review of the day’s lesson in the composition syllabus, which was divided into sections, each illustrating one of a variety of rhetorical techniques; the selections were brief—the better to scrutinize meticulously—and drawn mostly from the work of Olympians: Aristotle, Hobbes, Mill, Gibbon, Pater, Shaw, Swift, Sir Thomas Browne, etc. My three classes of freshman composition each met for one hour, five days a week. I began at eight thirty and finished at eleven thirty, three consecutive hours of hearing more or less the same student discussion and offering more or less the same observations myself—and yet never with any real flagging of enthusiasm. Much of my pleasure, in fact, derived from trying to make each hour appear to be the first of the day. Also there was a young man’s satisfaction in authority, especially as that authority did not require that I wear any badge other than my intelligence, my industriousness, a tie, and a jacket. Then of course I enjoyed, as I previously had as a student, the courtesy and good-humored seriousness of the pedagogical exchange, nearly as much as I enjoyed the sound of the word “pedagogical.” It was not uncommon at the university for faculty and students eventually to call one another by their given names, at least outside the classroom. I myself never considered this a possibility, however, any more than my father could have imagined being familiar in their offices with the businessmen who had hired him to keep their books; like him, I preferred to be thought somewhat stiff, rather than introduce considerations extraneous to the job to be done, and which might tempt either party to the transaction to hold himself less accountable than was “proper.” Especially for one so close to his students in age, there was a danger in trying to appear to be “a good guy” or “one of the boys”—as of course there was equally the danger of assuming an attitude of superiority that was not only in excess of my credentials, but distasteful in itself.

  That I should have to be alert to every fine point of conduct may seem to suggest that I was unnatural in my role, when actually it was an expression of the enthusiasm with which I took to my new vocation and of the passion I had in those days to judge myself by the strictest standard in every detail.

  By noon I would have returned to my small quiet apartment, eaten a sandwich I had prepared for myself, and already have begun work on my own fiction. Three short stories I had written during the evenings when I was in the army had all been accepted for publication in a venerable literary quarterly; they were, however, no more than skillful impersonations of the sort of stories I had been taught to admire most in college—stories of “The Garden Party” variety—and their publication aroused in me more curiosity than pride. I owed it to myself, I thought, to find out if I might have a talent that was my own. “To owe it to oneself,” by the way, was a notion entirely characteristic of a man like my father, whose influence upon my thinking was more pervasive than might have been apparent to anyone—myself included—who had listened to me, in the classroom, discussing the development of a theory in Aristotle or a metaphor in Sir Thomas Browne.

  At six P.M., following five hours of working at my fiction and an hour brushing up on my French—I planned to travel to Europe during the summer vacation—I bicycled back to the university to eat dinner in the Commons, where I had formerly taken my meals as a graduate student. The dark wood tones of the paneled hall, and the portraits of the university’s distinguished dead hanging above the refectory tables, satisfied a strong taste in me for institutional dignity. In such an environment I felt perfectly content to eat alone; indeed, I would not have considered myself unblessed to have been told that I would be dining off a tray in this hall, eating these stews and Salisbury steaks, for the rest of my days. Before returning to my apartment to mark one seventh of my weekly stack of sixty-odd freshman essays (as many as I could take in a sitting) and to prepare the next day’s lesson, I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores in the neighborhood. Owning my own “library” was my only materialistic ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousands of books to buy that week, I would frequently get so excited that by the time the purchase was accomplished I had to make use of the bookseller’s toilet facilities. I don’t believe that either microbe or laxative has ever affected me so strongly as the discovery that I was all at once the owner of a slightly soiled copy of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity in the original English edition.

  At ten o’clock, having completed my classroom preparation, I would go off to a local graduate-student hangout, where generally I ran into somebody I knew and had a glass of beer-one beer, one game of pinball
soccer, and then home, for before I went to sleep, there were still fifty pages to be underlined and annotated in some major work of European literature that either I hadn’t yet read or had misread the first time around. I called this “filling in the gaps.” Reading—and noting—fifty pages a night, I could average three books a month, or thirty-six a year. I also knew approximately how many short stories I might expect to complete in a year, if I put in thirty hours at it a week; and approximately how many students’ essays I could mark in an hour; and how large my “library” would be in a decade, if I were to continue to be able to make purchases in accordance with my present budget. And I liked knowing all these things, and to this day like myself for having known them.