My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

  Why did I stay with Spielvogel? Let us not forget his Mosaic prohibitions and what they meant to a thin-skinned man at the edge of he knew not what intemperate act.

  Thou shalt not covet thy wife’s underwear.

  Thou shalt not drop thy seed upon thy neighbor’s bathroom floor or dab it upon the bindings of library books.

  Thou shalt not be so stupid as to buy a Hoffritz hunting knife to slay your wife and her matrimonial lawyer.

  “But why can’t I? What’s the difference any more? They’re driving me crazy! They’re ruining my life! First she tricked me into marrying her with that urine, now they’re telling the judge I can write movies and make a fortune! She tells the court that I ‘obstinately’ refuse to go out to Hollywood and do an honest day’s work! Which is true! I obstinately refuse! Because that is not my work! My work is writing fiction! And I can’t even do that any more! Only when I say I can’t, they say, right, so just get your ass out to Hollywood where you can earn yourself a thousand bucks a day! Look! Just look at this affidavit she filed! Look what she calls me here, Doctor—’a well-known seducer of college girls’! That’s how she spells ‘Karen’! Read this document, will you please? I brought it so you can see with your own eyes that I am not exaggerating! Just look at this version of me! ‘A seducer of college girls’! They’re trying to hold me up, Doctor Spielvogel—this is legalized extortion!” “To be sure,” said my Moses, gently, “but still you cannot buy that knife and stick it in her heart. You must not buy a knife, Mr. Tarnopol.” “WHY NOT? GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON WHY NOT!” “Because killing is against the law.” “FUCK THE LAW! THE LAW IS WHAT IS KILLING ME!” “Be that as it may, kill her and they will put you in jail.” “So what!” “You wouldn’t like it there.” “I wouldn’t care—she’d be dead. Justice would come into this world!” “Ah, but Just as the world would become following her death, for you it still wouldn’t be paradise. You did not even like the army that much, remember? Well, jail is worse. I don’t believe you would be happy there.” “I’m not exactly happy here.” “I understand that. But there you would be even less happy.”

  So, with him to restrain me (or with him to pretend to restrain me, while I pretend to be unrestrained), I did not buy the knife in Hoffritz’s Grand Central window (her lawyer’s office was just across the street, twenty flights up). And a good thing too, for when I discovered that the reporter from the Daily News who sat in a black raincoat at the back of the courtroom throughout the separation proceedings had been alerted to the hearing by Maureen’s lawyers, I lost all control of myself (no pretending now), and out in the corridor during the lunch recess, I took a swing at the dapper, white-haired attorney in his dark three-piece suit with the Phi Beta Kappa key dangling conspicuously from a chain. He was obviously a man of years (though in mystate, I might even have attacked a somewhat younger man), but he was agile and easily blocked my wild blow with his briefcase. “Watch out, Egan, watch out for me!” It was pure play-groundese I shouted at him, language dating back to the arm’s-length insolence of grade-school years; my eyes were running with rage, as of old, but before I could swing out at his briefcase again, my own lawyer had grabbed me around the middle and was dragging me backward down the corridor. “You jackass,” said Egan coldly, “we’ll fix your wagon.” “You goddam thief! You publicity hound! What more can you do, you bastard!” “Wait and see,” said Egan, unruffled, and even smiling at me now, as a small crowd gathered around us in the hall. “She tricked me,” I said to him, “and you know it! With that urine!” “You’ve got quite an imagination, son. Why don’t you put it to work for you?” Here my lawyer managed to turn me completely around, and running and pushing at me from behind, shoved me a few paces farther down the courthouse corridor and into the men’s room.

  Where we were promptly joined by the stout, black-coated Mr. Valducci of the Daily News. “Get out of here, you,” I said, “leave me alone.” “I just want to ask you some questions. I want to ask about your wife, that’s all. I’m a reader of yours. I’m a real fan.” “I’ll bet.” “Sure. The Jewish Merchant. My wife read it too. Terrific ending. Ought to be a movie.” “Look, I’ve heard enough about the movies today!” “Take it easy, Pete—I just want to ask you, for instance, what did the missus do before you were married?” “The missus was a show girl! She was in the line at the Latin Quarter! Fuck off, will you!” “Whatever you say, whatever you say,” and with a bow to my attorney, who had now interposed himself between the two of us, Valducci stepped back a ways and asked, deferentially, “You don’t mind if I take a leak, do you? Since I’m already here?” While Valducci voided, we looked on in silence. “Just shut up,” my lawyer whispered to me. “See you, Pete,” said Valducci, after meticulously washing and drying his hands, “see you, Counselor.”

  The next morning, over Valducci’s by-line, in the lower half of page five, ran this three-column head—

  PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR TURNS COURTROOM PRIZEFIGHTER

  The story was illustrated with my book-jacket photo, dark-eyed, thin-faced innocence, circa 1959, and a photograph of Maureen taken the day before, her lantern jaw slicing the offending air as she strides down the courthouse steps on the arm of Attorney Dan P. Egan, who, the story noted (with relish) was seventy years old and formerly middleweight boxing champion at Ford-ham; in his heyday, I learned, he was known as “Red,” and was still a prized toastmaster at Fordham alumni functions. The tears I had shed during my contretemps with Red did not go unreported. “Oh, I should never have listened to you about that knife. I could have killed Valducci too.” “You are not satisfied with page five?” “I should have done it. And that judge too. Cut his self-righteous gizzard out, sitting there pitying poor Maureen!” “Please,” said Spielvogel, laughing lightly, “the pleasure would have been momentary.” “Oh, no, it wouldn’t.” “Oh, yes, believe me. Murder four people in a courtroom, and before you know it, it’s over and you’re behind bars. This way, you see, you have it always to imagine when your spirit needs a lift.”

  So I stayed on as Spielvogel’s patient, at least so long as Maureen drew breath (and breathed fire), and Susan McCall was my tender, appreciative, and devoted mistress.

  5. FREE

  Here lies my wife: here let her lie! Now she’s at rest, and so am I.

  —John Dryden, “Epitaph Intended for His Wife”

  It was three years later, in the spring of 1966, that Maureen telephoned to say she had to talk to me “personally” as soon as possible, and “alone,” no lawyers present. We had seen each other only twice since that courtroom confrontation reported in the Daily News, at two subsequent hearings held at Maureen’s request in order to determine if she could get any more than the hundred a week that Judge Rosenzweig had originally ordered the well-known seducer of college girls to pay in alimony to his abandoned wife. Both times a court-appointed referee had examined my latest tax return, my royalty statements and bank records, and concluded that no increase was warranted. I had pleaded that what was warranted was a reduction, since my income, rather than increasing, had fallen off by about thirty per cent since Judge Rosenzweig had first ordered me to pay Maureen five thousand dollars a year out of the ten I was then making. Rosenzweig’s decision had been based on a tax return that showed me earning a salary of fifty-two hundred a year from the University of Wisconsin and another five thousand from my publisher (representing one quarter of the substantial advance I was getting for my second book). By 1964, however, the last of the publisher’s four annual payments of five thousand dollars had been doled out to me, the book they had contracted with me for bore no resemblance to a finished novel, and I was broke. Out of each year’s ten thousand in income, five thousand had gone to Maureen for alimony, three to Spielvogel for services rendered, leaving two for food, rent, etc. At the time of the separation there had been another sixty-eight hundred in a savings account—my paperback proceeds from A Jewish Father-hut that too had been divided equally between the estranged couple by the judge, who then laid
the plaintiff’s legal fees on the defendant; by our third appearance at the courthouse, the remainder of those savings had been paid out to meet my own lawyer’s bills. In ‘65 Hofstra raised me to sixty-five hundred a year for teaching my two seminars, but my income from writing consisted only of what I could bring in from the short stories I was beginning to publish. To meet expenses I cut down my sessions with Spielvogel from three to two a week, and began to borrow money from my brother to live on. Each time I came before the referee I explained to him that I was now giving my wife somewhere between sixty-five and seventy per cent of my income, which did not strike me as fair. Mr. Egan would then point out that if Mr. Tarnopol wished to “normalize” his income, or even “to improve his lot in life, as most young men strive to do,” he had only to write fiction for Esquire, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, or for Playboy magazine, whose editors would pay him—here, to read the phenomenal figure, he donned his tortoiseshell glasses—“three thousand dollars for a single short story.” As evidence in support of his claim, he produced letters subpoenaed from my files, wherein the fiction editors of these magazines invited me to submit any work I had on hand or planned for the future. I explained to the referee (an attentive, gentlemanly, middle-aged Negro, who had announced, at the outset, that he was honored to meet the author of A Jewish Father; another admirer—God only knew what that meant) that every writer of any eminence at all receives such letters as a matter of course; they were not in the nature of bids, or bribes, or guarantees of purchase. When I finished writing a story, as I had recently, I turned it over to my agent, who, at my suggestion, submitted it to one or another of the commercial magazines Mr. Egan had named. There was nothing I could do to make the magazine purchase it for publication; in fact, over the previous few years three of these magazines, the most likely to publish my work, had repeatedly rejected fiction of mine (letters of rejection submitted here by my lawyer as proof of my plunging literary reputation), despite those warm invitations for submission, which of course cost them nothing to send out. Certainly, I said, I could not submit to them stories that I had not written, and I could not write stories—about here I generally lost my temper, though the referee’s equanimity remained serenely intact—on demand! “Oh, my,” sighed Egan, turning to Maureen, “the artiste bit again.” “What? What did you say?” I threateningly inquired, though we sat around a conference table in a small office in the courthouse, and I, like the referee, had heard every word that Egan had whispered. “I said, sir,” replied Egan, “that I wish I was an artiste and didn’t have to work ‘on demand’ either.” Here we were brought gently to order by the referee, who, if he did not give me my reduction, did not give Maureen her increase either.

  I took no comfort in his “fairness,” however. Money was constantly on my mind: what was being extorted from me by Maureen, in collusion (as I saw it) with the state of New York, and what I was now borrowing from Moe, who refused to take interest or to set a date for repayment. “What do you want me to do, shylock my own flesh and blood?” he said, laughing. “I hate this, Moey.” “So you hate it,” was his reply.

  My lawyer’s opinion was that actually I ought to be happy that the alimony now appeared to have been “stabilized” at a hundred a week, regardless of fluctuation in my income. I said, “Regardless of fluctuation down, you mean. What about fluctuation up?” “Well, you’d be getting more that way, too, Peter,” he reminded me. “But then ‘stabilized’ doesn’t mean stabilized at all, does it, if I should ever start to bring in some cash?” “Why don’t we cross that bridge when we come to it? For the time being, the situation looks as good to me as it can.”

  But it was only a few days after the last of our hearings that a letter arrived from Maureen; admittedly, I should have destroyed it unread. Instead I tore open the envelope as though it contained an unknown manuscript of Dostoevsky’s. She wished to inform me that if I “drove” her to “a breakdown,” I would be the one responsible for her upkeep in a mental hospital. And that would come to something more than “a measly” hundred dollars a week—it would come to three times that. She had no intention of obliging me by being carted off to Bellevue. It was clearly Payne Whitney she was shooting for. And this, she told me, was no idle threat—her psychiatrist had warned her (which was why she was warning me) that she might very well have to be institutionalized one day if I were to continue to refuse “to be a man.” And being a man, as the letter went on to explain, meant either coming back to her to resume our married life, and with it “a civilized role in society,” or failing that, going out to Hollywood where, she informed me, anybody with the Prix de Rome in his hip pocket could make a fortune. Instead I had chosen to take that “wholly unrealistic” job at Hofstra, working one day a week, so that I could spend the rest of my time writing a vindictive novel about her. “I’m not made of steel,” the letter informed me, “no matter what it pleases you to tell people about me. Publish a book like that and you will regret the consequences till your dying day.”

  As I begin to approach the conclusion of my story, I should point out that all the while Maureen and I were locked in this bruising, painful combat—indeed, almost from the moment of our first separation hearing in January 1963, some six months after my arrival in New York—the newspapers and the nightly television news began to depict an increasingly chaotic America and to bring news of bitter struggles for freedom and power which made my personal difficulties with alimony payments and inflexible divorce laws appear by comparison to be inconsequential. Unfortunately, these highly visible dramas of social disorder and human misery did nothing whatsoever to mitigate my obsession; to the contrary, that the most vivid and momentous history since World War Two was being made in the streets around me, day by day, hour by hour, only caused me to feel even more isolated by my troubles from the world at large, more embittered by the narrow and guarded life I now felt called upon to live—or able to live—because of my brief, misguided foray into matrimony. For all that I may have been attuned to the consequences of this new social and political volatility, and like so many Americans moved to pity and fear by the images of violence flashing nightly across the television screen, and by the stories of brutality and lawlessness appearing each morning on page one of the New York Times, I simply could not stop thinking about Maureen and her hold over me, though, to be sure, my thinking about her hold over me was, as I well knew, the very means by which she continued to hold me. Yet I couldn’t stop—no scene of turbulence or act of terror that I read about in the papers could get me to feel myself any less embattled or entrapped.

  In the spring of 1963, for instance, when for nights on end I could not get to sleep because of my outrage over Judge Rosenzweig’s alimony decision, police dogs were turned loose on the demonstrators in Birmingham; and just about the time I began to imagine myself plunging a Hoffritz hunting knife into Maureen’s evil heart, Medgar Evers was shot to death in his driveway in Mississippi. In August 1963, my nephew Abner telephoned to ask me to accompany him and his family to the civil rights demonstration in Washington; the boy, then eleven, had recently read A Jewish Father and given a report on it in school, likening me, his uncle (in a strained, if touching conclusion), to “men like John Steinbeck and Albert Camus.” So I drove down in their car to Washington with Morris, Lenore, and the two boys, and with Abner holding my hand, listened to Martin Luther King proclaim his “dream”—on the way home I said, “You think we can get him to speak when I go to alimony jail?” “Sure,” said Moe, “also Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They’ll assemble at City Hall and sing ‘Tarnopol Shall Overcome’ to the mayor.” I laughed along with the kids, but wondered who would protest, if I defied the court order to continue to support Maureen for the rest of her natural days and said I’d go to jail instead, for the rest of mine if need be. No one would protest, I realized: enlightened people everywhere would laugh, as though we two squabbling mates were indeed Blondie and Dagwood, or Maggie and Jiggs…In September, Abner was student chairm
an of his school’s memorial service to commemorate the death of the children killed in the Birmingham church bombing—I attended, again at his invitation, but halfway through a reading by a strapping black girl of a poem by Lang-ston Hughes, slipped out from my seat beside my sister-in-law to race over to my lawyer’s office and show him the subpoena that had been served on me earlier that morning while I sat getting my teeth cleaned in the dentist’s office—I had been asked to show cause why the alimony shouldn’t be raised now that I was “a full-time faculty member” of Hofstra College…In November President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I made my walk to Spielvogel’s office by what must have turned out to be a ten-mile route. I wandered uptown in the most roundabout fashion, stopping wherever and whenever I saw a group of strangers clustered together on a street corner; I stood with them, shrugged and nodded at whatever they said, and then moved on. And of course I wasn’t the only unattached soul wandering around like that, that day. By the time I got to Spielvogel’s the waiting-room door was locked and he had gone home. Which was just as well with me: I didn’t feel like “analyzing” my incredulity and shock. Shortly after I arrived at Susan’s I got a phone call from my father. “I’m sorry to bother you at your friend’s,” he said, somewhat timidly, “I got the name and number from Morris.” “That’s okay,” I said, “I was going to call you.” “Do you remember when Roosevelt died?” I did indeed—so too had the young protagonist of A Jewish Father. Didn’t my father remember the scene in my novel, where the hero recalls his own father’s grieving for FDR? It had been drawn directly from life: Joannie and I had gone down with him to the Yonkers train station to pay our last respects as a family to the dead president, and had listened in awe (and with some trepidation) to our father’s muffled, husky sobbing when the locomotive, draped in black bunting and carrying the body of FDR, chugged slowly through the local station on its way up the river to Hyde Park; that summer, when we went for a week’s vacation to a hotel in South Fallsburg, we had stopped off at Hyde Park to visit the fallen president’s grave. “Truman should be such a friend to the Jews,” my mother had said at the graveside, and the emotion that had welled up in me when she spoke those words came forth in a stream of tears when my father added, “He should rest in peace, he loved the common man.” This scene too had been recalled by the young hero of A Jewish Father, as he lay in bed with his German girl friend in Frankfurt, trying to explain to her in his five-hundred-word German vocabulary who he was and where he came from and why his father, a good and kindly man, hated her guts…Nonetheless my father had asked me on the phone that night, “Do you remember when Roosevelt died?”—for whatever he read of mine he could never really associate with our real life; just as I on the other hand could no longer have a real conversation with him that did not seem to me to be a reading from my fiction. Indeed, what he then proceeded to say to me that night struck me as something out of a book I had already written. And likewise what little I said to him—for this was a father-and-son routine that went way back and whose spirit and substance was as familiar to me as a dialogue by Abbott and Costello,…which isn’t to say that being a partner in the act ever left me unaffected by our patter. “You’re all right?” he asked, “I don’t mean to interrupt you at your friend’s. You understand that?” “That’s okay.” “But I just wanted to be sure you’re all right.” “I’m all right.” “This is a terrible thing. I feel for the old man—he must be taking it hard. To lose another son—and like that. Thank God there’s still Bobby and Ted.” “That should help a little.” “All, what can help,” moaned my father, “but you’re all right?” “I’m fine.” “Okay, that’s the most important thing. When are you going to court again?” he asked. “Next month sometime.” “What does your lawyer say? What are the prospects? They can’t sock you again, can they?” “We’ll see.” “You got enough cash?” he asked. “I’m all right.” “Look, if you need cash—“ “I’m fine. I don’t need anything.” “Okay. Stay in touch, will you, please? We’re starting to feel like a couple of lepers up here, where you’re concerned.” “I will, I’ll be in touch.” “And let me know immediately how the court thing turns out. And if you need any cash.” “Okay.” “And don’t worry about anything.