by Philip Roth
What I read next brought me up off the ottoman and to my feet, as though in a terrifying dream my name had finally been called—then I remembered that blessedly it was not a Jewish novelist in his late twenties or early thirties called Tarnopol, but a nameless Italian-American poet in his forties that Spielvogel claimed to be describing (and diagnosing) for his colleagues. “…leaving his semen on fixtures, towels, etc., so completely libidinized was his anger; on another occasion, he dressed himself in nothing but his wife’s underpants, brassiere, and stockings…?” Stockings? Oh, I didn’t put on her stockings, damn it! Can’t you get anything right? And it was not at all “another occasion”! One, she had just drawn blood from her wrist with my razor; two, she had just confessed (a) to perpetrating a fraud to get me to marry her and (b) to keeping it secret from me for three wretched years of married life; three, she had just threatened to put Karen’s “pure little face” in every newspaper in Wisconsin-Then came the worst of it, what made the protective disguise of the Italian-American poet so ludicrous…In the very next paragraph Spielvogel recounted an incident from my childhood that I had myself narrated somewhat more extensively in the autobiographical New Yorker story published above my name the previous month.
It had to do with a move we had made during the war, when Moe was off in the merchant marine. To make way for the landlord’s newlywed daughter and her husband, we had been dispossessed from the second-floor apartment of the two-family house where we had been living ever since the family had moved to Yonkers from the Bronx nine years earlier, when I’d been born. My parents had been able to find a new apartment very like our old one, and fortunately only a little more expensive, some six blocks away in the same neighborhood; nonetheless, they had been infuriated by the high-handed treatment they had received from the landlord, particularly given the loving, proprietary care that my mother had taken of the building, and my father of the little yard, over the years. For me, being uprooted after a lifetime in the same house was utterly bewildering; to make matters even worse, the first night in our new apartment I had gone to bed with the room in a state of disarray that was wholly foreign to our former way of life. Would it be this way forever-more? Eviction? Confusion? Disorder? Were we on the skids? Would this somehow result in my brother’s ship, off in the dangerous North Atlantic, being sunk by a German torpedo? The day after the move, when it came time to go home from school for lunch, instead of heading off for the new address, I “unthinkingly” returned to the house in which I had lived all my life in perfect safety with brother, sister, mother, and father. At the second-floor landing I was astonished to find the door to our apartment wide open and to hear men talking loudly inside. Yet standing in the hallway on that floor planed smooth over the years by my mother’s scrub brush, I couldn’t seem to get myself to remember that we had moved the day before and now lived elsewhere. “It’s Nazis!” I thought. The Nazis had parachuted into Yonkers, made their way to our street, and taken everything away. Taken my mother away. So I suddenly perceived it. I was no braver than the ordinary nine-year-old, and no bigger, and so where I got the courage to peek inside I don’t know. But when I did, I saw that “the Nazis” were only the house-painters sitting on a drop cloth on what used to be our living-room floor, eating their sandwiches out of wax-paper wrappings. I ran—down that old stairwell, the feel of the rubber treads on each stair as familiar to me as the teeth in my head, and through the neighborhood to our new family sanctum, and at the sight of my mother in her apron (unbeaten, unbloodied, unraped, though visibly distressed from imagining what might have happened to delay her punctual child on his way home from school), I collapsed into her arms in a fit of tears.
Now, as Spielvogel interpreted this incident, I cried in large part because of “guilt over the aggressive fantasies directed toward the mother.” As I construed it—in the short story in journal form, entitled “The Diary of Anne Frank’s Contemporary”— I cry with relief to find that my mother is alive and well, that the new apartment has been transformed during the morning I have been in school into a perfect replica of the old one—and that we are Jews who live in the haven of Westchester County, rather than in our ravaged, ancestral, Jew-hating Europe.
Susan finally came in from the kitchen to see what I was doing off by myself.
“Why are you standing there like that? Peter, what’s happened?”
I held the journal in the air. “Spielvogel has written an article about something he calls creativity.’ And I’m in it.”
“By name?”
“No, but identifiably me. Me coming home to the wrong house when I was nine. He knew I was using it. I talked about that story to him, and still he goes ahead and has some fictitious Italian-American poet—!”
“Who? I can’t follow you.”
“Here!” I handed her the magazine. “Here! This straw fucking patient is supposed to be me! Read it! Read this thing!”
She sat down on the ottoman and began to read. “Oh, Peter.”
“Keep going.”
“It says…”
“What?”
“It says here—you put on Maureen’s underwear and stockings. Oh, he’s out of his mind.”
“He’s not—I did. Keep reading.”
Her tear appeared. “You did?”
“Not the stockings, no—that’s him, writing his banal fucking fiction! He makes it sound like I was dressing up for the drag-queen ball! All I was doing, Susan, was saying, ‘Look, I wear the panties in this family and don’t you forget it!’ That’s all it boils down to! Keep reading! He doesn’t get anything right. It’s all perfectly off!”
She read a little further, then put the magazine in her lap. “Oh, sweetheart.”
“What? What?”
It says…
“My sperm?”
“Yes.”
“I did that too. But I don’t anymore! Keep reading!”
“Well,” said Susan, wiping away her tear with a fingertip, “don’t shout at me. I think it’s awful that he’s written this and put it in print. It’s unethical, it’s reckless—and I can’t even believe he would do such a thing. You tell me he’s so smart. You make him sound so wise. But how could anybody wise do something so insensitive and uncaring as this?”
“Just read on. Read the whole hollow pretentious meaningless tiling, right on down to the footnotes from Goethe and Baudelaire to prove a connection between ‘narcissism’ and ‘art’! So what else is new? Oh, Jesus, what this man thinks of as evidence! ‘As Sophocles has written,’—and that constitutes evidence! Oh, you ought to go through this thing, line by line, and watch the ground shift beneath you! Between every paragraph there’s a hundred-foot drop!”
“What are you going to do?”
“What can I do? It’s printed—it’s out.”
“Well, you just can’t sit back and take it. He’s betrayed your confidence!”
“I know that.”
“Well, that’s terrible.”
“I know that!”
“Then do something!” she pleaded.
On the phone Spielvogel said that if I was as “distressed” as I sounded—“I am!” I assured him—he would stay after his last patient to see me for the second time that day. So, leaving Susan (who had much to be distressed about, too), I took a bus up
Madison to his office and sat in the waiting room until seven thirty, constructing in my mind angry scenes that could only culminate in leaving Spielvogel forever.
The argument between us was angry, all right, and it went on unabated through my sessions for a week, but it was Spielvogel, not I, who finally suggested that I leave him. Even while reading his article, I hadn’t been so shocked—so unwilling to believe in what he was doing—as when he suddenly rose from his chair (even as I continued my attack on him from the couch) and took a few listing steps around to where I could see him. Ordinarily I addressed myself to the bookcase in front of the couch, or to the ceiling overhead, or to the photograph of the Acropolis that I could see o
n the desk across the room. At the sight of him at my side, I sat straight up. “Look,” he said, “this has gone far enough. I think either you will have now to forget this article of mine, or leave me. But we cannot proceed with treatment under these conditions.”
“What kind of choice is that?” I asked, my heart beginning to beat wildly. He remained in the middle of the room, supporting himself now with a hand on the back of a chair. “I have been your patient for over two years. I have an investment here —of effort, of time, of hope, of money. I don’t consider myself recovered. I don’t consider myself able to go at my life alone just yet. And neither do you.”
“But if as a result of what I have written about you, you find me so ‘untrustworthy’ and so ‘unethical,’ so absolutely ‘wrong’ and, as you put it, ‘off’ about relations between you and your family, then why would you want to stay on as a patient any longer? It is clear that I am too flawed to be your doctor.”
“Come off it, please. Don’t hit me over the head with the ‘narcissism’ again. You know why I want to stay on.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m scared to be out there alone. But also because I am stronger—things in my life are better. Because staying with you, I was finally able to leave Maureen. That was no inconsequential matter for me, you know. If I hadn’t left her, I’d be dead—dead or in jail. You may drink that’s an exaggeration, but I happen to know that it’s true. What I’m saying is that on the practical side, on the subject of my everyday life, you have been a considerable help to me. You’ve been with me through some bad times. You’ve prevented me from doing some wild and foolish things. Obviously I haven’t been coming here three times a week for two years for no reason. But all that doesn’t mean that this article is something I can just forget.”
“But there is really nothing more to be said about it. We have discussed it now for a week. We have been over it thoroughly. There is nothing new to add.”
“You could add that you were wrong.”
“I have answered the charge already and more than once. I don’t find anything I did ‘wrong.’”
“It was wrong, it was at the very least imprudent, for you to use that incident in your article, knowing as you did that I was using it in a story.”
“We were writing simultaneously, I explained that to you.”
“But I told you I was using it in the Anne Frank story.”
“You are not remembering correctly. I did not know you had used it until I read the story last month in the New Yorker. By then the article was at the printer’s.”
“You could have changed it then—left that incident out. And I am not remembering incorrectly.”
“First you complain that by disguising your identity I misrepresent you and badly distort the reality. You’re a Jew, not an Italian-American. You’re a novelist, not a poet. You came to me at twenty-nine, not at forty. Then in the next breath you complain that I fail to disguise your identity enough—rather, that I have revealed your identity by using this particular incident. This of course is your ambivalence again about your ‘special-ness.
“It is not of course my ambivalence again! You’re confusing the argument again. You’re blurring important distinctions—just as you do in that piece! Let’s at least take up each issue in turn.”
“We have taken up each issue in turn, three and four times over.
“But you still refuse to get it. Even if your article was at the printer, once you had read the Anne Frank story you should have made every effort to protect my privacy—and my trust in you!
“It was impossible.”
“You could have withdrawn the article.”
“You are asking the impossible.”
“What is more important, publishing your article or keeping my trust?”
“Those were not my alternatives.”
“But they were.”
“That is the way you see it. Look here, we are clearly at an impasse, and under these conditions treatment cannot be continued. We can make no progress.”
“But I did not just walk in off the street last week. I am your patient.”
“True. And I cannot be under attack from my patient any longer.”
“Tolerate it,” I said bitterly—a phrase of his that had helped me through some rough days. “Look, given that you must certainly have had an inkling that I might be using that incident in a piece of fiction, since you in fact knew I was working on a story to which that incident was the conclusion, mightn’t you at the very least have thought to ask my permission, ask if it was all right with me…”
“Do you ask permission of the people you write about?”
“But I am not a psychoanalyst! The comparison won’t work. I write fiction—or did, once upon a time. A Jewish Father was not ‘about’ my family, or about Grete and me, as you certainly must realize. It may have originated there, but it was finally a contrivance, an artifice, a rumination on the real. A self-avowed work of imagination, Doctor! I do not write ‘about’ people in a strict factual or historical sense.”
“But then you think,” he said, with a hard look, “that I don’t either.”
“Dr. Spielvogel, please, that is just not a good enough answer. And you must know it. First off, you are bound by ethical considerations that happen not to be the ones that apply to my profession. Nobody comes to me with confidences the way they do to you, and if they tell me stories, it’s not so that I can cure what ails them. That’s obvious enough. It’s in the nature of being a novelist to make private life public—that’s a part of what a novelist is up to. But certainly it is not what I thought you were up to when I came here. I thought your job was to treat me! And second, as to accuracy—you are supposed to be accurate, after all, even if you haven’t been as accurate as I would want you to be in this thing here.”
“Mr. Tarnopol, ‘this thing here’ is a scientific paper. None of us could write such papers, none of us could share our findings with one another, if we had to rely upon the permission or the approval of our patients in order to publish. You are not the only patient who would want to censor out the unpleasant facts or who would find ‘inaccurate’ what he doesn’t like to hear about himself.”
“Oh that won’t wash, and you know it! I’m willing to hear anything about myself—and always have been. My problem, as I see it, isn’t my impenetrability. As a matter of fact, I tend to rise to the bait, Dr. Spielvogel, as Maureen, for one, can testify.”
“Oh, do you? Ironically, it is the narcissistic defenses discussed here that prevent you from accepting the article as something other than an assault upon your dignity or an attempt to embarrass or belittle you. It is precisely the blow to your narcissism that has swollen the issue out of all proportion for you. Simultaneously, you act as though it is about nothing but you, when actually, of the fifteen pages of text, your case takes up barely two. But then you do not like at all the idea of yourself suffering from ‘castration anxiety.’ You do not like the idea of your aggressive fantasies vis-à-vis your mother. You never have. You do not like me to describe your father, and by extension you, his son and heir, as ‘ineffectual’ and ‘submissive,’ although you don’t like when I call you ‘successful’ either. Apparently that tends to dilute a little too much your comforting sense of victimized innocence.”
“Look, I’m sure there are in New York City such people as you’ve just described. Only I ain’t one of ‘em! Either that’s some model you’ve got in your head, some kind of patient for all seasons, or else it’s some other patient of yours you’re thinking about; I don’t know what the hell to make of it, frankly. Maybe what it comes down to is a problem of self-expression; maybe it’s that the writing isn’t very precise.”
“Oh, the writing is also a problem?”
“I don’t like to say it, but maybe writing isn’t your strong point.”
He smiled. “Could it be, in your estimation? Could I be precise enough to please you? I think perhaps what so disturbs you about the incident i
n the Anne Frank story is not that by using it I may have disclosed your identity, but that in your opinion I plagiarized and abused your material. You are made so very angry by this piece of writing that I have dared to publish. But if I am such a weak and imprecise writer as you suggest, then you should not feel so threatened by my little foray into English prose.”
“I don’t feel ‘threatened.’ Oh, please, don’t argue like Maureen, will you? That is just more of that language again, which doesn’t at all express what you mean and doesn’t get anyone anywhere.”
“I assure you, unlike Maureen, I said ‘threatened’ because I meant ‘threatened.’”
“But maybe writing isn’t your strong point. Maybe that is an objective statement of fact and has nothing to do with whether I am a writer or a tightrope walker.”
“But why should it matter so much to you?”
