by Philip Roth
II
My True Story
Peter Tarnopol was born in Yonkers, New York, thirty-four years ago. He was educated in public schools there, and was graduated summa cum laude from Brown University in 1954. He briefly attended graduate school, and then served for two years as an MP with the U.S. Army in Frankfurt, Germany, the setting for A Jewish Father, the first novel for which in 1960 he received the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Since then he has published only a handful of stories, devoting himself almost exclusively in the intervening years to his nightmarish marriage to the former Maureen Johnson of Elmira, New York. In her lifetime, Mrs. Tarnopol was a barmaid, an abstract painter, a sculptress, a waitress, an actress (and what an actress), a short-story writer, a liar, and a psychopath. Married in 1959, the Tarnopols were legally separated in 1962, at which time Mrs. Tarnopol accused the author, before Judge Milton Rosenzweig of the Supreme Court of the County of New York, of being “a well-known seducer of college girls.” (Mr. Tarnopol has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin and lately at Hofstra College on Long Island.) The marriage was dissolved in 1966 by Mrs. Tarnopol’s violent death. At the time of her demise she was unemployed and a patient in group therapy in Manhattan; she was receiving one hundred dollars a week in alimony.
From 1963 to 1966, Mr. Tarnopol conducted a love affair with Susan Seabury McCall, herself a young widow residing in Manhattan; upon the conclusion of the affair, Mrs. McCall attempted unsuccessfully to kill herself and is currently living unhappily in Princeton, New Jersey, with a mother she cannot abide, hike Mr. Tarnopol, Mrs. McCall has no children, but would very much like to before time runs out, sired preferably by Mr. Tarnopol. Mr. Tarnopol is frightened of remarrying, among other things.
From 1962 until 1967, Mr. Tarnopol was the patient of the psychoanalyst Dr. Otto Spielvogel of New York City, whose articles on creativity and neurosis have appeared in numerous journals, most notably the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies, of which he is a contributing editor. Mr. Tarnopol is considered by Dr. Spielvogel to be among the nation’s top young narcissists in the arts. Six months ago Mr. Tarnopol terminated his analysis with Dr. Spielvogel and went on leave from the university in order to take up temporary residence at the Quahsay Colony, a foundation-supported retreat for writers, painters, sculptors, and composers in rural Vermont. There Mr. Tarnopol keeps mostly to himself, devoting nights as well as days to considering what has become of his life. He is confused and incredulous much of the time, and on the subject of the late Mrs. Tarnopol, he continues to be a man possessed.
Presently Mr. Tarnopol is preparing to forsake the art of fiction for a while and embark upon an autobiographical narrative, an endeavor which he approaches warily, uncertain as to both its advisability and usefulness. Not only would the publication of such a personal document raise serious legal and ethical problems, but there is no reason to believe that by keep-ing his imagination at bay and rigorously adhering to the facts, Mr. Tarnopol will have exorcised his obsession once and for all. It remains to be seen whether his candor, such as it is, can serve any better than his art (or Dr. Spielvogel’s therapeutic devices) to demystify the fast and mitigate his admittedly un-commendable sense of defeat.
P. T.
Quahsay, Vt.
September 1967
1. PEPPY
Has anything changed?
I ask, recognizing that on the surface (which is not to be disparaged—I live there too) there is no comparing the thirty-four-year-old man able today to manage his misfortunes without collapse, to the twenty-nine-year-old boy who back in the summer of 1962 actually contemplated, however fleetingly, killing himself. On the June afternoon that I first stepped into Dr. Spielvogel’s office, I don’t think a minute elapsed before I had given up all pretense of being an “integrated” personality and begun to weep into my hands, grieving for the loss of my strength, my confidence, and my future. I was then (miraculously, I am no longer) married to a woman I loathed, but from whom I was unable to separate myself, subjugated not simply by her extremely professional brand of moral blackmail—by that mix of luridness and corn that made our life together resemble something serialized on afternoon TV or in the National Enquirer—but by my own childish availability to it. Just two months back I had learned of the ingenious strategy by which she had deceived me into marrying her three years earlier; instead of serving me as the weapon with which finally to beat my way out of our bedlam, what she had confessed (in the midst of her semiannual suicide attempt) seemed to have stripped me of my remaining defenses and illusions. My mortification was complete. Neither leaving nor staying meant anything to me any more.
When I came East that June from Wisconsin, ostensibly to participate as a staff member in a two-week writing workshop at Brooklyn College, I was as bereft of will as a zombie—except, as I discovered, the will to be done with my life. Waiting in the subway station for an approaching train, I suddenly found it advisable to wrap one hand around the links of a chain that anchored a battered penny weighing machine to the iron pillar beside me. Until the train had passed in and out of view, I squeezed that chain with all my strength. “I am dangling over a ravine,” I told myself. “I am being hoisted from the waves by a helicopter. Hang on!” Afterward I scanned the tracks, to be certain that I had in fact succeeded in stifling this wholly original urge for Peter Tarnopol to be transformed into a mangled corpse; amazed, terrified, I had also, as they say, to laugh: “Commit suicide? Are you kidding? You can’t even walk out the door.” I still don’t know how near I may actually have come that day to springing across the platform and, in lieu of taking my wife head-on, taking on that incoming IRT train. It could be that I didn’t have to cling to anything, that too could have been so much infantile posturing; then again I may owe my survival to the fact that when I heard blessed oblivion hurtling my way, my right hand fortunately found something impressively durable to hang on to.
At Brooklyn College over a hundred students were present in the auditorium for the opening session; each member of the workshop staff of four was to give a fifteen-minute address on “the art of fiction.” My turn came, I rose—and couldn’t speak. I stood at the lectern, notes before me—audience before me— without air in my lungs or saliva in my mouth. The audience, as I remember it, seemed to me to begin to hum. And all I wanted was to go to sleep. Somehow I didn’t close my eyes and give it a try. Neither was I entirely there. I was nothing but heartbeat, just that drum. Eventually I turned and left the stage…and the job…Once, in Wisconsin, after a weekend of quarreling with my wife (she maintained, over my objections, that I had talked too long to a pretty graduate student at a party on Friday night; much discussion on the relativity of time), she had presented herself at the door of the classroom where I taught my undergraduate fiction seminar from seven to nine on Monday evenings. Our quarrel had ended at breakfast that morning with Maureen tearing at my hands with her fingernails; I had not been back to our apartment since. “It’s an emergency!” Maureen informed me—and the seminar. The ten middle western undergraduates looked first at her, standing so determinedly there in the doorway, and then with comprehension at my hands, marked with mercurochrome—“The cat,” I had explained to them earlier, with a forgiving smile for that imaginary beast. I rushed out into the corridor before Maureen had a chance to say more. There my sovereign delivered herself of that day’s manifesto: “You better come home tonight, Peter! You better not go back to some room somewhere with one of those little blondes!” (This was the semester before I went ahead and did just that.) “Get out of here!” I whispered. “Go, Maureen, or I’ll throw you down those fucking stairs! Go, before I murder you!” My tone must have impressed her—she took hold of the banister and retreated a step. I turned back to the seminar room to find that in my haste to confront Maureen and send her packing, I had neglected to shut the door behind me. A big shy farm girl from Appleton, who had spo
ken maybe one sentence all semester, was staring fixedly at the woman in the corridor behind me; the rest of the class stared into the pages of Death in Venice—no book had ever been so riveting. “All right,” said the quavering voice that entered the room—an arm had violently flung the door shut in Maureen’s face, I’m not wholly sure it was mine—“why does Mann send Aschenback to Venice, rather than Paris, or Rome, or Chicago?” Here the girl from Appleton dissolved into tears, and the others, usually not that lively, began answering the question all at once…I did not recall every last detail of this scene as I stood yearning for sleep before my expectant audience at Brooklyn College, but it accounts, I think, for the vision that I had as I stepped to the lectern to deliver my prepared address: I saw Maureen, projected like a bullet through the rear door of the auditorium, and shouting at the top of her lungs whatever revelation about me had just rolled off the presses. Yes, to that workshop audience that took me to be an emerging literary figure, a first novelist whose ideas about writing were worth paying tuition to hear, Maureen would reveal (without charge) that I was not at all as I would present myself. To whatever words, banal or otherwise, that I spoke from the platform, she would cry, “Lies! Filthy, self-serving lies!” I could (as I intended to) quote Conrad, Flaubert, Henry James, she would scream all the louder, “Fraud!” But I spoke not a syllable, and in my flight from the stage, seemed to be only what I was—terrified, nothing any longer but my fears.
My writing by this time was wholly at the mercy of our marital confusion. Five and six hours a day, seven days a week, I went off to my office at the university and ran paper through the roller of my typewriter; the fiction that emerged was either amateurishly transparent—I might have been drawing up an IOU or writing the instructions for the back of a detergent box for all the imagination I displayed—or, alternately, so disjointed and opaque that on rereading, I was myself in the dark, and manuscript in hand, would drag myself around the little room, like some burdened figure broken loose from Rodin’s “Bourgeois of Calais,” crying aloud, “Where was I when this was written?” And I asked because I didn’t know.
These pounds and pounds of pages that I accumulated during the marriage had the marriage itself as the subject and constituted the major part of the daily effort to understand how I had fallen into this trap and why I couldn’t get out. Over the three years I had tried easily a hundred different ways to penetrate that mystery; every other week the whole course of the novel would change in midsentence, and within any one month the surface of my desk would disappear beneath dozens of equally dissatisfying variants of the single unfinished chapter that was driving me mad. Periodically I would take all these pages—“take” is putting it mildly—and consign them to the liquor carton filling up with false starts at the bottom of my closet, and then I would begin again, often with the very first sentence of the book. How I struggled for a description. (And, alas, struggle still.) But from one version to the next nothing of consequence ever happened: locales shifted, peripheral characters (parents, old flames, comforters, enemies, and allies) came and went, and with about as much hope for success as a man attacking the polar ice cap with his own warm breath, I would attempt to release a flow of invention in me by changing the color of her eyes or my hair. Of course, to give up the obsession would surely have made the most sense; only, obsessed, I was as incapable of not writing about what was killing me as I was of altering or understanding it.
So: hopeless at my work and miserable in my marriage, with all the solid achievements of my early twenties gone up in smoke, I walked off the stage, too stupefied even for shame, and headed like a sleepwalker for the subway station. Fortunately there was a train already there receiving passengers; it received me—rather than riding over me—and within the hour I was deposited at the Columbia campus stop only a few blocks from my brother Morris’s apartment.
My nephew Abner, surprised and pleased to see me in New York, offered me a bottle of soda and half of his salami sandwich. “I’ve got a cold,” he explained, when I asked in a breaking voice what he was doing home from school. He showed me that he was reading Invisible Man with his lunch. “Do you really know Ralph Ellison, Uncle Peppy?” “I met him once,” I said, and then I was bawling, or barking; tears streamed from my eyes, but the noises that I made were novel even to me. “Hey, Uncle Pep, what’s the matter?” “Get your father.” “He’s teaching.” “Get him, Abbie.” So the boy called the university—“This is an emergency; his brother is very sick!”—and Morris was out of class and home in minutes. I was in the bathroom by this time; Moe pushed right on in, and then, big two-hundred pounder though he is, kneeled down in that tiny tiled room beside the toilet, where I was sitting on the seat, watery feces running from me, sweating and simultaneously trembling as though I were packed in ice; every few minutes my head rolled to the side and I retched in the direction of the sink. Still, Morris pressed his bulk against my legs and held my two limp hands in his; with a rough, rubbery cheek he wiped the perspiration from my brow. “Peppy, ah, Peppy,” he groaned, calling me by my childhood nickname and kissing my face. “Hang on, Pep, I’m here now.”
A word about my brother and sister, very different creatures from myself.
I am the youngest of three, always “the baby” in everyone’s eyes, right down to today. Joan, the middle child, is five years my senior and has lived most of her adult life in California with her husband Alvin, a land developer, and their four handsome children. Says Morris of our sister: “You would think she’d been born in a Boeing jet instead of over the store in the Bronx.” Alvin Rosen, my brother-in-law, is six foot two and intimidatingly handsome, particularly now that his thick curls have turned silvery (“My father thinks he dyes it that color,” Abner once told me in disgust) and his face has begun to crease like a cowboy’s; from all the evidence he seems pretty much at one with his life as Californian, yachtsman, skier, and real estate tycoon, and utterly content with his wife and his children. He and my trim stylish sister travel each year to places slightly off the main tourist route (or just on the brink of being “discovered”); only recently my parents received postcards from their granddaughter, Melissa Rosen, Joannie’s ten-year-old, postmarked Africa (a photo safari with the family) and Brazil (a small boat had carried friends and family on a week-long journey up the Amazon, a famous Stanford naturalist serving as their guide). They throw open their house for an annual benefit costume party each year in behalf of Bridges, the West Coast literary magazine whose masthead lists Joan as one of a dozen advisory editors—frequently they are called upon to bail the magazine out of financial trouble with a timely donation from the Joan and Alvin Rosen Foundation; they are also generous contributors to hospitals and libraries in the Bay Area and among the leading sponsors of an annual fund drive for California’s migrant workers (“Capitalists,” says Morris, “in search of a conscience. Aristocrats in overalls. Fragonard should paint ‘em.”); and they are good parents, if the buoyancy and beauty of their children are any indication. To dismiss them (as Morris tends to) as vapid and frivolous would be easier if their pursuit of comfort, luxury, beauty, and glamor (they number a politically active movie star among their intimates) weren’t conducted with such openness and zest, with a sense that they had discovered the reason for being. My sister, after all, was not always so fun loving and attractive or adept at enjoying life. In 1945, as valedictorian of Yonkers High, she was a hairy, hawk-nosed, undernourished-looking little “grind” whose braininess and sallow homeliness had made her just about the least popular girl in her class; the consensus then was that she would be lucky to find a husband, let alone the rich, lanky, Lincolnesque Wharton School graduate, Alvin Rosen, whom she carried away from the University of Pennsylvania along with her A.B. in English. But she did it—not without concentrated effort, to be sure. Electrolysis on the upper lip and along the jawbone, plastic surgery on the nose and chin, and the various powders and paints available at the drugstore have transformed her into a sleek, sensual type, stil
l Semitic, but rather more the daughter of a shah than a shopkeeper. Driving around San Francisco in her Morgan, disguised as a rider off the pampas one day and a Bulgarian peasant the next, has gained her in her middle years something more than mere popularity—according to the society page of the San Francisco paper (also sent on to my mother by little Melissa) Joan is “the most daring and creative tastemaker” alive out there. The photograph of her, with Alvin in velvet on one bare arm and the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony on the other (captioned, by Melissa, “Mom at a party”), is simply staggering to one who remembers still that eight-by-ten glossy of the ‘45 senior prom crowd at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe in New York—there sits Joan, all nose and shoulder blades, adrift in a taffeta “strapless” into which it appears she will momentarily sink out of sight, her head of coarse dark hair (since straightened and shined so that she glows like Black Beauty) mockingly framed by the Amazonian gams of the chorus girl up on the stage behind her; as I remember it, sitting beside her, at their “ringside” table, was her date, the butcher’s large shy son, bemusedly looking down into a glass with a Tom Collins in it…And this woman today is the gregarious glamor girl of America’s most glamorous city. To me it is awesome: that she should be on such good terms with pleasure, such a success at satisfaction, should derive so much strength and confidence from how she looks, and where she travels, and what she eats and with whom…well, that is no small thing, or so it seems to her brother from the confines of his hermit’s cell.
