by Philip Roth
Now I realize that it is possible to dismiss these generalizations as a manifestation of my bitterness and cynicism, an unfortunate consequence of my own horrific marriage and of the affair that recently ended so unhappily. Furthermore, it can be said that, having chosen women like Maureen and Susan (or, if you prefer, having had them chosen for me by my own aberrant, if not pathological, nature), I for one should not generalize, even loosely, about what men want (and get) from women, or what women want and get out of men. Well, I grant that I do not find myself feeling very “typical” at this moment, nor am I telling this story in order to argue that my life is representative of anything; nonetheless, I am naturally interested in looking around to see how much of my experience with women has been special to me and—if you must have it that way—my pathology, and how much is symptomatic of a more extensive social malaise. And looking around, I conclude this: in Maureen and Susan I came in contact with two of the more virulent strains of a virus to which only a few women among us are immune.
Outwardly, of course, Maureen and Susan couldn’t have been more dissimilar, nor could either have had a stronger antipathy for the “type” she took the other to be. However, what drew them together as women—which is to say, what drew me to them, for that is the subject here—was that in her own extreme and vivid way, each of these antipathetic originals demonstrated that sense of defenselessness and vulnerability that has come to be a mark of their sex and is often at the core of their relations with men. That I came to be bound to Maureen by my helplessness does not mean that either of us ever really stopped envisioning her as the helpless victim and myself as the victimizer who had only to desist in his brutishness for everything to be put right and sexual justice to be done. So strong was the myth of male inviolability, of male dominance and potency, not only in Maureen’s mind but in mine, that even when I went so far as to dress myself in a woman’s clothes and thus concede that as a man I surrendered, even then I could never fully assent to the idea that in our household conventional assumptions about the strong and the weak did not adequately describe the situation. Right down to the end, I still saw Maureen, and she saw herself, as the damsel in distress; and in point of fact, beneath all that tough exterior, all those claims to being “in business for herself” and nobody’s patsy, Maureen was actually more of a Susan than Susan was, and. to herself no less than to me.
There is a growing body of opinion which maintains that by and large marriages, affairs, and sexual arrangements generally are made by masters in search of slaves: there are the dominant and the submissive, the brutish and the compliant, the exploiters and the exploited. What this formula fails to explain, among a million other things, is why so many of the “masters” appear themselves to be in bondage, oftentimes to their “slaves.” I do not contend—to make the point yet again—that my story furnishes anything like an explanation or a paradigm; it is only an instance, a post-chivalric instance to be sure, of what might be described as the Prince Charming phenomenon. In this version of the fairy tale the part of the maiden locked in the tower is played consecutively by Maureen Johnson Tarnopol and Susan Seabury McCall. I of course play the prince. My performance, as described here, may give rise to the sardonic suggestion that I should have played his horse. But, you see, it was not as an animal that I wished to be a star—it was decidedly not horsiness, goatishness, foxiness, lionliness, or beastliness in any form that I aspired to. I wanted to be humanish: manly, a man.
At the time when all this began, I would never even have thought it necessary to announce that as an aspiration—I was too confident at twenty-five that success was all but at hand—nor did I foresee a career in which being married and then trying to get unmarried would become my predominant activity and obsession. I would have laughed had anyone suggested that struggling with a woman over a marriage would come to occupy me in the way that exploring the South Pole had occupied Admiral Byrd—or writing Madame Bovary had occupied Flaubert. Clearly the last thing I could have imagined was myself, a dissident and skeptical member of my generation, succumbing to all that moralizing rhetoric about “permanent relationships.” And, in truth, it did take something more than the rhetoric to do me in. It took a Maureen, wielding it. Yet the humbling fact remains: when the dissident and skeptical member of his generation was done in, it was on the same grounds as just about everyone else.
I was fooled by appearances, largely my own.
As a young writer already publishing stories in literary quarterlies, as one who resided in a Lower East Side basement apartment between Second Avenue and the Bowery, living on army savings and a twelve-hundred-dollar publisher’s advance that I doled out to myself at thirty dollars a week, I did not think of myself as an ordinary or conventional university graduate of those times. My college acquaintances were all off becoming lawyers and doctors; a few who had been friends on the Brown literary magazine were working on advanced degrees in literature—prior to my induction into the army, I had myself served a year and a half in the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, before falling by the wayside, a casualty of “Bibliography” and “Anglo-Saxon”; the rest—the fraternity boys, the athletes, the business majors, those with whom I’d had little association at school—were by now already married and holding down nine-to-five jobs. Of course I dressed in blue button-down oxford shirts and wore my hair clipped short, but what else was I to wear, a serape? long curls? This was 1958. Besides, there were other ways in which it seemed to me I was distinguishable from the mass of my contemporaries: I read books and I wanted to write them. My master was not Mammon or Fun or Propriety, but Art, and Art of the earnest moral variety. I was by then already well into writing a novel about a retired Jewish haberdasher from the Bronx who on a trip to Europe with his wife nearly strangles to death a rude German housewife in his rage over “the six million.” The haberdasher was modeled upon my own kindly, excitable, hard-working Jewish father who had had a similar urge on a trip he and my mother had taken to visit me in the army; the haberdasher’s GI son was modeled upon myself, and his experiences closely paralleled mine in Germany during my fourteen months as a corporal in Frankfurt. I had had a German girl friend, a student nurse, large and blonde as a Valkyrie, but sweet to the core, and all the confusion that she had aroused in my parents, and in me, was to be at the heart of the novel that eventually became A Jewish Father.
Over my desk I did not have a photograph of a sailboat or a dream house or a diapered child or a travel poster from a distant land, but words from Flaubert, advice to a young writer that I had copied out of one of his letters: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I appreciated the wisdom in this, and coming from Flaubert, the wit, but at twenty-five, for all my dedication to the art of fiction, for all the discipline and seriousness (and awe) with which I approached the Flaubertian vocation, I still wanted my life to be somewhat original, and if not violent, at least interesting, when the day’s work was done. After all, hadn’t Flaubert himself, before he settled down at his round table to become the tormented anchorite of modern literature, gone off as a gentleman-vagabond to the Nile, to climb the pyramids and sow his oats with dusky dancing girls?
So: Maureen Johnson, though not exactly Egyptian, struck me as someone who might add a little outside interest to my dedicated writer’s life. Did she! Eventually she displaced the writing, she was so interesting. To begin with, she was twenty-nine years of age, that temptingly unknown creature of a young man’s eroto-heroic imaginings, an older woman. Moreover, she had the hash marks to prove it. Not one but two divorces: first from the husband in Rochester, a Yugoslav saloonkeeper named Mezik, whose sixteen-year-old barmaid she had been; she claimed that Mezik, a heavy drinker with a strong right hook, had once “forced” her to go down on a friend of his, the manager of an upholstery factory—later she changed the story somewhat and said that the three of them had been drunk at the time, and that the men had drawn straws to see which of t
hem young Maureen would go off with to the bedroom; she had decided to blow Mezik’s buddy, rather than have intercourse with him, because it had seemed to her, in the circumstances and in her innocence, less demeaning. “It wasn’t,” she added. Then the marriage and divorce from Walker, a handsome young actor with a resonant voice and a marvelous profile who turned out to be a homosexual—that is to say, he’d “promised” Maureen he’d get over it after the wedding, but only got worse. Twice then she had been “betrayed” by men—nonetheless there was plenty of the scrapper in her when we met. And plenty of tough wit. “I am Duchess of Malfi still,” was a line she pulled on me our first night in bed—not bad, I thought, not bad, even if it was obviously something her actor husband had taught her. She had the kind of crisp good looks that are associated with “dark Irishmen”—only a little marred in her case by a lantern jaw—a lithe, wiry little body (the body of a tomboyish prepubescent, except for the sizable conical breasts) and terrific energy and spirit. With her quick movements and alert eyes, she was like one of nature’s undersized indefatigables, the bee or the hummingbird, who are out working the flowers from sunup to sundown, sipping from a million stamens in order to meet their minimum daily nutritional requirements. She jocularly boasted of having been the fastest runner, male or female, of her era in the Elmira, New York, grade-school system, and that (of all she told me) may well have been the truth. The night we met—at a poet’s party uptown—she had challenged me to a footrace from the Astor Place subway station to my apartment two blocks away on East Ninth: “Winner calls the shots!” she cried, and off we went —I triumphed, but only by the length of a brownstone, and at the apartment, breathless from the race she’d run me, I said, “Okay, the spoils: take off your clothes,” which she gladly (and rapidly) proceeded to do in the hallway where we stood, panting. Hot stuff, this (thought I); very interesting. Oh yes, she was fast, that girl—but I was faster, was I not?…Also, I should mention here, Maureen had these scores to settle with my sex, and rather large delusions about her gifts, which she had come to believe lay somewhere, anywhere, in the arts.
At the age of sixteen, an eleventh-grader, she had run away from her family’s home in Elmira—a runaway, that got me too. I’d never met a real one before. What did her father do? “Everything. Nothing. Handyman. Night watchman. Who remembers any more?” Her mother? “Kept house. Drank. Oh, Christ, Peter, I forgot them long ago. And they, me.” She ran off from Elmira to become—of course, an actress…but of all places, to Rochester. “What did I know?” she said, dismissing her innocence with a wave of the hand; a dead issue, that innocence. In Rochester she met Mezik (“married the brute—and then met his buddy”), and after three years of frustration with the second-raters in the local avant-garde theater group, switched to art school to become—an abstract painter. Following her divorce, she gave up painting—and the painter whose mistress she had become during her separation from Mezik and who had broken his “promise” to help get her in with his dealer in Detroit—and took harpsichord lessons while waiting on tables in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a town she’d heard had fewer types like Mezik in residence. There, just twenty-one, she married Walker of the Brattle Theater; five long years followed, of him and his Harvard boys. By the time we met, she had already tried wood sculpture in Greenwich Village (her teacher’s wife was fiercely jealous of her, so she dropped it) and was back “in the theater,” temporarily “in the production end”—that is, taking tickets and ushering at an off-Broadway theater on Christopher Street.
As I say, I believed all these reversals and recoveries, all this movement of hers, to be evidence of a game, audacious, and determined little spirit; and it was, it was. So too did this mess of history argue for a certain instability and lack of focus in her life. On the other hand, there was so much focus to my own, and always had been, that Maureen’s chaotic, daredevil background had a decidedly exotic and romantic appeal. She had been around—and around. I liked that idea; I hadn’t been anywhere really, not quite yet.
She was also something of a rough customer, and that was new to me too. At the time I took up with Maureen, I had for nearly a year been having a passionate affair with a college girl named Dina Dornbusch, a senior at Sarah Lawrence and the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Long Island. She was an ambitious literature and language major, and we met when she came to my basement apartment, along with four other coeds and a Mademoiselle editor, to interview me about my work. I had just gotten out of the army, and my “work” at the time consisted only of the six short stories that had been published in the quarterlies while I had been stationed in Frankfurt; that they had been read by these awed young girls was very nice to know. I already knew of course that they had been read with interest by New York book publishers and literary agents, for their numerous letters of inquiry had reached me in Germany, and upon returning to the U.S. after my discharge, I had chosen an agent and subsequently signed a publisher’s contract that provided me with a modest advance for the novel I was writing. But that I had, while serving as a draftee in Germany, achieved enough “fame” for these girls to settle on me as the young American writer they wished to interview for a feature in the magazine, well, needless to say, that opened up a fantasy or two in my head. To be sure, I talked to them about Flaubert, about Salinger, about Mann, about my experiences in Germany and how I thought I might put them to use in fiction, but nonetheless I was wondering throughout how to get the girl with the marvelous legs and the earnest questions to stay behind when the others left.
Oh, why did I forsake Dina Dombusch—for Maureen! Shall I tell you? Because Dina was still in college writing papers on “the technical perfection” of “Lycidas.” Because Dina listened to me so intently, was so much my student, taking my opinions for her own. Because Dina’s father gave us front-row seats to Broadway musicals that we had to go to see for fear of offending him. Because—yes, this is true, too; incredible, but true—because when Dina came in to visit me from school, practically all we did, from the moment she stepped into the doorway, was fuck. In short, because she was rich, pretty, protected, smart, sexy, adoring, young, vibrant, clever, confident, ambitious—that’s why I gave her up for Maureen! She was a girl still, who had just about everything. I, I decided at twenty-five, was beyond “that.” I wanted something called “a woman.”
At twenty-nine, with two unhappy marriages behind her, with no rich, doting father, no gorgeous clothes, and no future, Maureen seemed to me to have earned all that was implied by that noun; she was certainly the first person of her sex I had ever known intimately to be so completely adrift and on her own. “I’ve always been more or less in business for myself,” she’d told me at the party where we’d met—straight, unsentimental talk, and I liked it. With Dina, everybody seemed always to be in business for her. Likewise with myself.
Prior to Maureen, the closest I had come to a girl who had known real upheaval in her life was Grete, the student nurse in Frankfurt, whose family had been driven from Pomerania by the advancing Russian army. I used to be fascinated by whatever she could tell me about her experience of the war, but that turned out to be next to nothing. Only a child of eight when the war ended, all she could remember of it was living in the country with her brothers and sisters and her mother, on a farm where they had eggs to eat, animals to play with, and spelling and arithmetic to learn in the village school. She remembered that when the family, in flight in the spring of ‘45, finally ran into the American army, a GI had given her an orange; and on the farm sometimes, when the children were being particularly noisy, her mother used to put her hands up to her ears and say, “Children, quiet, quiet, you sound like a bunch of Jews.” But that was as much contact as she seemed to have had with the catastrophe of the century. This did not make it so simple for me as one might think, nor did I in turn make it easy for Grete. Our affair frequently bewildered her because of my moodiness, and when she then appeared to be innocent of what it was that had made me sullen or short-tempered, I became ev
en more difficult. Of course, she had been only eight when the European war ended—nonetheless, I could never really believe that she was simply a big, sweet, good-natured, commonsensical eighteen-year-old girl who did not care very much that I was a dark Jew and she a blonde Aryan. This suspiciousness, and my self-conscious struggle with it, turned up in the affair between the two young lovers depicted in A Jewish Father.
What I liked, you see, was something taxing in my love affairs, something problematical and puzzling to keep the imagination going even while I was away from my books; I liked most being with young women who gave me something to think about, and not necessarily because we talked together about “ideas.”
So, Maureen was a rough customer—I thought about that. I wondered if I was “up”—nice word—to someone with her history and determination. It would seem by the way I hung in there that I decided that I at least ought to be. I had been up to Grete and the problems she raised for me, had I not? Why back away from difficulties, or disorder, or even turbulence—what was there to be afraid of? I honestly didn’t know.