Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  I’m wrong—it turns out to be what Aunt Rhoda calls his “superiority complex.” “Sitting there, sneering at us like that,” says my aunt, somewhat superior now herself. “Sneering?” repeats my father, incredulous. “Sneering and laughing, yes!” says Aunt Rhoda. My mother shrugs. “I didn’t think he was laughing.” “Oh, don’t worry, by himself there he was having a very good time—at our expense. I know the European-type man. Underneath they think they’re all lords of the manor,” Rhoda says. “You know something, Rhoda?” says my father, tilting his head and pointing a finger, “I think you fell in love.” “With him? Are you crazy?” “He’s too quiet for Rhoda,” my mother says. “I think maybe he’s a little bit of a wallflower. Rhoda is a very lively person, she needs lively people around her.” “Wallflower? He’s not a wallflower! He’s a gentleman, that’s all. And he’s lonely,” my father says assertively, glaring at my mother for going over his head like this against Kafka. My Aunt Rhoda is forty years old—it is not exactly a shipment of brand-new goods that he is trying to move. “He’s a gentleman, he’s an educated man, and I’ll tell you something, he’d give his eyeteeth to have a nice home and a wife.” “Well,” says my Aunt Rhoda, “let him find one then, if he’s so educated. Somebody who’s his equal, who he doesn’t have to look down his nose at with his big sad refugee eyes!” “Yep, she’s in love,” my father announces, squeezing Rhoda’s knee in triumph. “With him?” she cries, jumping to her feet, taffeta crackling around her like a bonfire. “With Kafka?” she snorts. “I wouldn’t give an old man like him the time of day!”

  Dr. Kafka calls and takes my Aunt Rhoda to a movie. I am astonished, both that he calls and that she goes; it seems there is more desperation in life than I have come across yet in my fish tank. Dr. Kafka takes my Aunt Rhoda to a play performed at the “Y.” Dr. Kafka eats Sunday dinner with my grandmother and my Aunt Rhoda and, at the end of the afternoon, accepts with that formal bow of his the mason jar of barley soup that my grandmother presses him to carry back to his room with him on the No. 8 bus. Apparently he was very taken with my grandmother’s jungle of potted plants—and she, as a result, with him. Together they spoke in Yiddish about gardening. One Wednesday morning, only an hour after the store has opened for the day, Dr. Kafka shows up at the dry-goods department of the Big Bear; he tells Aunt Rhoda that he just wants to see where she works. That night he writes in his diary: “With the customers she is forthright and cheery, and so managerial about ‘taste’ that when I hear her explain to a chubby young bride why green and blue do not ‘go,’ I am myself ready to believe that Nature is in error and R. is correct.”

  One night, at ten, Dr. Kafka and Aunt Rhoda come by unexpectedly, and a small impromptu party is held in the kitchen—coffee and cake, even a thimbleful of whiskey all around, to celebrate the resumption of Aunt Rhoda’s career on the stage. I have only heard tell of my aunt’s theatrical ambitions. My brother says that when I was small she used to come to entertain the two of us on Sundays with her puppets—she was at that time employed by the W.P.A. to travel around New Jersey and put on marionette shows in schools and even in churches; Aunt Rhoda did all the voices and, with the help of a female assistant, manipulated the manikins on their strings. Simultaneously she had been a member of the Newark Collective Theater, a troupe organized primarily to go around to strike groups to perform Waiting for Lefty. Everybody in Newark (as I understood it) had had high hopes that Rhoda Pilchik would go on to Broadway—everybody except my grandmother. To me this period of history is as difficult to believe in as the era of the lake dwellers, which I am studying in school; people say it was once so, so I believe them, but nonetheless it is hard to grant such stories the status of the real, given the life I see around me.

  Yet my father, a very avid realist, is in the kitchen, schnapps glass in hand, toasting Aunt Rhoda’s success. She has been awarded one of the starring roles in the Russian masterpiece The Three Sisters, to be performed six weeks hence by the amateur group at the Newark “Y.” Everything, announces Aunt Rhoda, everything she owes to Franz and his encouragement. One conversation—“One!” she cries gaily—and Dr. Kafka had apparently talked my grandmother out of her lifelong belief that actors are not serious human beings. And what an actor he is, in his own right, says Aunt Rhoda. How he had opened her eyes to the meaning of things, by reading her the famous Chekhov play—yes, read it to her from the opening line to the final curtain, all the parts, and actually left her in tears. Here Aunt Rhoda says, “Listen, listen—this is the first line of the play—it’s the key to everything. Listen—I just think about what it was like the night Pop passed away, how I wondered and wondered what would become of us, what would we all do—and, and, listen—”

  “We’re listening,” laughs my father. So am I listening, from my bed.

  Pause; she must have walked to the center of the kitchen linoleum. She says, sounding a little surprised, “‘It’s just a year ago today that father died.’”

  “Shhh,” warns my mother, “you’ll give the little one nightmares.”

  I am not alone in finding my aunt a “changed person” during the weeks of rehearsal. My mother says this is just what she was like as a little girl. “Red cheeks, always those hot, red cheeks—and everything exciting, even taking a bath.” “She’ll calm down, don’t worry,” says my father, “and then he’ll pop the question.” “Knock on wood,” says my mother. “Come on,” says my father, “he knows what side his bread is buttered on—he sets foot in this house, he sees what a family is all about, and believe me, he’s licking his chops. Just look at him when he sits in that club chair. This is his dream come true.” “Rhoda says that in Berlin, before Hitler, he had a young girl friend, years and years it went on, and then she left him. For somebody else. She got tired of waiting.” “Don’t worry,” says my father, “when the time comes I’ll give him a little nudge. He ain’t going to live forever, either, and he knows it.”

  Then one weekend, as a respite from the “strain” of nightly rehearsals—which Dr. Kafka regularly visits, watching in his hat and coat at the back of the auditorium until it is time to accompany Aunt Rhoda home—they take a trip to Atlantic City. Ever since he arrived on these shores Dr. Kafka has wanted to see the famous boardwalk and the horse that dives from the high board. But in Atlantic City something happens that I am not allowed to know about; any discussion of the subject conducted in my presence is in Yiddish. Dr. Kafka sends Aunt Rhoda four letters in three days. She comes to us for dinner and sits till midnight crying in our kitchen. She calls the “Y” on our phone to tell them (weeping) that her mother is still ill and she cannot come to rehearsal again—she may even have to drop out of the play. No, she can’t, she can’t, her mother is too ill, she herself is too upset! goodbye! Then back to the kitchen table to cry. She wears no pink powder and no red lipstick, and her stiff brown hair, down, is thick and spiky as a new broom.

  My brother and I listen from our bedroom, through the door that silently he has pushed ajar.

  “Have you ever?” says Aunt Rhoda, weeping. “Have you ever?”

  “Poor soul,” says my mother.

  “Who?” I whisper to my brother. “Aunt Rhoda or—”

  “Shhhh!” he says. “Shut up!”

  In the kitchen my father grunts. “Hmm. Hmm.” I hear him getting up and walking around and sitting down again—and then grunting. I am listening so hard that I can hear the letters being folded and unfolded, stuck back into their envelopes, then removed to be puzzled over one more time.

  “Well?” demands Aunt Rhoda. “Well?”

  “Well what?” answers my father.

  “Well, what do you want to say now?”

  “He’s meshugeh,” admits my father. “Something is wrong with him all right.”

  “But,” sobs Aunt Rhoda, “no one would believe me when I said it!”

  “Rhody, Rhody,” croons my mother in that voice I know from those times that I have had to have stitches taken, or when I have awakened in tear
s, somehow on the floor beside my bed. “Rhody, don’t be hysterical, darling. It’s over, kitten, it’s all over.”

  I reach across to my brother’s twin bed and tug on the blanket. I don’t think I’ve ever been so confused in my life, not even by death. The speed of things! Everything good undone in a moment! By what? “What?” I whisper. “What is it?”

  My brother, the Boy Scout, smiles leeringly and, with a fierce hiss that is no answer and enough answer, addresses my bewilderment: “Sex!”

  Years later, a junior at college, I receive an envelope from home containing Dr. Kafka’s obituary, clipped from The Jewish News, the tabloid of Jewish affairs that is mailed each week to the homes of the Jews of Essex County. It is summer, the semester is over, but I have stayed on at school, alone in my room in the town, trying to write short stories. I am fed by a young English professor and his wife in exchange for baby-sitting; I tell the sympathetic couple, who are also loaning me the money for my rent, why it is I can’t go home. My tearful fights with my father are all I can talk about at their dinner table. “Keep him away from me!” I scream at my mother. “But, darling,” she asks me, “what is going on? What is this all about?”—the very same question with which I used to plague my older brother, asked now of me and out of the same bewilderment and innocence. “He loves you,” she explains.

  But that, of all things, seems to me precisely what is blocking my way. Others are crushed by paternal criticism—I find myself oppressed by his high opinion of me! Can it possibly be true (and can I possibly admit) that I am coming to hate him for loving me so? praising me so? But that makes no sense—the ingratitude! the stupidity! the contrariness! Being loved is so obviously a blessing, the blessing, praise such a rare bequest. Only listen late at night to my closest friends on the literary magazine and in the drama society—they tell horror stories of family life to rival The Way of All Flesh, they return shell-shocked from vacations, drift back to school as though from the wars. What they would give to be in my golden slippers! “What’s going on?” my mother begs me to tell her; but how can I, when I myself don’t fully believe that this is happening to us, or that I am the one who is making it happen. That they, who together cleared all obstructions from my path, should seem now to be my final obstruction! No wonder my rage must filter through a child’s tears of shame, confusion, and loss. All that we have constructed together over the course of two century-long decades, and look how I must bring it down—in the name of this tyrannical need that I call my “independence”! My mother, keeping the lines of communication open, sends a note to me at school: “We miss you”—and encloses the brief obituary notice. Across the margin at the bottom of the clipping, she has written (in the same hand with which she wrote notes to my teachers and signed my report cards, in that very same handwriting that once eased my way in the world), “Remember poor Kafka, Aunt Rhoda’s beau?”

  “Dr. Franz Kafka,” the notice reads, “a Hebrew teacher at the Talmud Torah of the Schley Street Synagogue from 1939 to 1948, died on June 3 in the Deborah Heart and Lung Center in Browns Mills, New Jersey. Dr. Kafka had been a patient there since 1950. He was 70 years old. Dr. Kafka was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and was a refugee from the Nazis. He leaves no survivors.”

  He also leaves no books: no Trial, no Castle, no Diaries. The dead man’s papers are claimed by no one, and disappear—all except those four “meshugeneh” letters that are, to this day, as far as I know, still somewhere in among the memorabilia accumulated by my spinster aunt, along with a collection of Broadway Playbills, sales citations from the Big Bear, and transatlantic steamship stickers.

  Thus all trace of Dr. Kafka disappears. Destiny being destiny, how could it be otherwise? Does the Land Surveyor reach the Castle? Does K. escape the judgment of the Court, or Georg Bendemann the judgment of his father? “‘Well, clear this out now!’ said the overseer, and they buried the hunger artist, straw and all.” No, it simply is not in the cards for Kafka ever to become the Kafka—why, that would be stranger even than a man turning into an insect. No one would believe it, Kafka least of all.

  Books by Philip Roth

  GOODBYE, COLUMBUS

  LETTING GO

  WHEN SHE WAS GOOD

  PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT

  OUR GANG

  THE BREAST

  THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

  MY LIFE AS A MAN

  READING MYSELF AND OTHERS

  About the Author

  Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933. He is the author of eight books of fiction: Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Letting Go (1962), When She Was Good (1967), Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Our Gang (1971), The Breast (1972), The Great American Novel (1973), and My Life as a Man (1974). Since 1965 he has been on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches literature one semester of each year. He is also general editor of “Writers from the Other Europe,” a new Penguin Books series of fiction from Eastern Europe. In 1970 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

  1975

  Copyright © 1961, 1963, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975 by Philip Roth

  All rights reserved

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Doubleday Canada Ltd., Toronto

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Roth, Philip.

  Reading myself and others.

  1. Roth, Philip—Interviews. I. Title.

  PS3568.0855Z52 813'.5'4 75-2475

  eISBN 9781466846470

  First eBook edition: May 2013

  *An interview conducted by the Italian critic Walter Mauro, for his collection of interviews with writers on the subject of power. (1974)

  *The interviewer is George Plimpton; the interview appeared in The New York Times Book Review the Sunday Portnoy’s Complaint was reviewed there. (1969)

  *See here.

  *Written in 1974.

  *See “Some New Jewish Stereotypes”.

  *My remarks here grew out of a lengthy conversation I had with a Random House executive who in 1971 was uneasy about publishing Our Gang. He objected to the book principally on grounds of taste; also he wondered if it might not be politically counterproductive—that is, if one could imagine it having any political effect at all. Since there would doubtless be other readers who would share the publisher’s point of view, I asked Alan Lelchuk (who is the interviewer here) if he would help me to reconstruct and extend my thoughts on the subjects of satire, Nixon, and Our Gang, so that they might appear in print in this form. (1971)

  *A Nixon parody written some twenty months after Our Gang was published, at the height of the Senate Watergate hearings. (1973)

  *The interviewer is Alan Lelchuk. (1972)

  *I conducted this interview with myself. (1973)

  *See here.

  *Witness this book.

  *The interviewer is Martha Saxton. (1974)

  *The interviewer here is Joyce Carol Oates. (1974)

  *See here.

  *Originally a speech delivered at Stanford University, which cosponsored with Esquire magazine a symposium on “Writing in America Today.” (1960)

  *In the late fifties and early sixties, Mike Wallace, now a seasoned CBS correspondent, ran an exceedingly abrasive TV interview show; I appeared there to be cross-examined by him after Goodbye, Columbus won a National Book Award.

  *Originally a speech delivered at Loyola University (Chicago) for a symposium on “The Needs and Images of Man,” sponsored jointly by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and Loyola. (1961)

  *This essay evolved from remarks delivered in 1962 and 1963 at the University of Iowa Hillel House, the Hartford, Conn., Jewish Community Center, and Yeshiva University. (1963)

  *This piece appeared in the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times a few days before the New York opening of Unlikely Heroes, a dramatization by Larry Arrick of three stories from Goodbye, Columbus. (1971)

  *In February 1969, after riots had already destroyed
much of Newark’s black slums, the City Council voted to strike from the city budget the $2.8 million required to finance the Newark Museum and the Newark Public Library. Hundreds of Newark residents vehemently opposed this move, which would have shut down two exceptional civic institutions. In the face of the protest, the council eventually rescinded their decision. My piece appeared on the editorial page of The New York Times about two weeks after the announcement of the budget cutback. (1969)

  *Written at the invitation of The New York Times, to appear on the Op-Ed page on the opening day of the baseball season. (1973)

  *I visited Cambodia in March 1970, two months before President Nixon ordered the “incursion” by American and South Vietnamese troops that touched off the full-scale Cambodian war. The proposal appeared in Look magazine. (1970)

  *This piece was prompted by President Ford’s announcement on Sunday morning, September 8, 1974—a month after he had taken office—that he was giving an unconditional pardon to his predecessor for any crimes he may have committed while he was President of the United States. (1974)

  *My contribution to a 1972 Esquire colloquium entitled “Which Writer Under Thirty-Five Has Your Attention and What Has He Done to Get It?” American Mischief was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1973.