The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (20 page)

By the time we’d returned to America in September, I had decided to live completely on my own. Now that it was possible in the late Senator Kennedy’s state for me to marry May (or anyone else I chose), the idea was intolerable: I was not about to be reined in right off by, of all things, another marriage certificate. That May, inside a marriage or out, hadn’t the slightest potential for behaving like Josie wasn’t even the point; I simply could not unlearn overnight what the years of legal battling had taught me, which was never, but
never,
to hand over again to the state and its judiciary the power to decide to whom I should be most profoundly committed, in what way, and for how long. I could not imagine ever again being a husband who was ultimately under their punitive mechanisms of authority, and, however little I may have experienced of genuine fatherhood as a part-time pedagogue helping Josie’s children learn their ABCs, I felt that I could not be a father under their jurisdiction either. The subpoenas, the depositions, the courtroom inquisitions, the property disputes, the newspaper coverage, the legal bills—it had all been too painful and too humiliating and had gone on far too long for me ever again voluntarily to become the plaything of those moral imbeciles. What’s more, I now didn’t even wish to be bound by what had been the countervailing balm to the legacy of marital hatred, the loving loyalty of May Aldridge. Instead I was determined to be an absolutely independent, self-sufficient man—to recapture, in other words, twelve years on, at age thirty-five, that exhilarating, adventurous sense of personal freedom that had prompted the high-flying freshman-composition teacher, on a fall evening in 1956, to go blithely forward in his new Brooks Brothers suit and, without the slightest idea that he might be risking his life, handily pick up on a Chicago street the small-town blond divorcée with the two little fatherless children, the penniless ex-waitress whom he’d already spotted serving cheeseburgers back in graduate school, and who’d looked to him like nothing so much as the All-American girl, albeit one enticingly at odds with her origins.

Dear Roth,

I’ve read the manuscript twice. Here is the candor you ask for: Don’t publish—you are far better off writing about me than “accurately” reporting your own life. Could it be that you’ve turned yourself into a subject not only because you’re tired of me but because you believe I am no longer someone through whom you can detach yourself from your biography at the same time that you exploit its crises, themes, tensions, and surprises? Well, on the evidence of what I’ve just read, I’d say you’re still as much in need of me as I of you—and that I need you is indisputable. For me to speak of “my” anything would be ridiculous, however much there has been established in me the illusion of an independent existence. I owe everything to you, while you, however, owe me nothing less than the freedom to write freely. I am your permission, your indiscretion, the key to disclosure. I understand that now as I never did before.

What you choose to tell in fiction is different from what you’re permitted to tell when nothing’s being fictionalized, and in this book you are not permitted to tell what it is you tell best: kind, discreet, careful—changing people’s names because you’re worried about hurting their feelings—no, this isn’t you at your most interesting. In the fiction you can be so much more truthful without worrying all the time about causing direct pain. You try to pass off here as frankness what looks to me like the dance of the seven veils—what’s on the page is like a code for something missing. Inhibition appears not only as a reluctance to say certain things but, equally disappointing, as a slowing of pace, a refusal to explode, a relinquishing of the need I ordinarily associate with you for the acute, explosive moment.

As for characterization, you, Roth, are the least completely rendered of all your protagonists. Your gift is not to personalize your experience but to personify it, to embody it in the representation of a person who is
not
yourself. You are not an autobiographer, you’re a personificator. You have the reverse experience of most of your American contemporaries. Your acquaintance with the facts, your sense of the facts, is much less developed than your understanding, your intuitive weighing and balancing of fiction. You make a fictional world that is far more exciting than the world it comes out of. My guess is that you’ve written metamorphoses of yourself so many times, you no longer have any idea what
you
are or ever were. By now what you are is a walking text.

The history of your education as narrated here—of going out into the world, leaving the small circle, and getting your head knocked in—certainly doesn’t strike me as more dense or eventful than my own as narrated in my bildungsroman, excepting, of course, for the marital ordeal. You point out that something like that experience would eventually become the fate of my unfortunate predecessor, Tarnopol; for this I can’t be sufficiently grateful, though when it came to the Jewish opposition to my writing, I only wish that, like yours, my own occupation would not have pitted me against my family.

I wonder if you have any real idea of what it’s like to be disowned by a dying father because of something you wrote. I assure you that there is no equivalence between that and a
hundred
nights on the rack at Yeshiva. My father’s condemnation of me provided you, obviously, with the opportunity to pull out all the stops on a Jewish deathbed scene; that had to have been irresistible to a temperament like yours. Nonetheless, knowing what I now do about your father’s enthusiasm for your first stories and about the pride he took in their publication, I feel, whether inappropriately or not, envious, cheated, and misused. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you at least be mildly disturbed to learn, say, that Josie had been inflicted on you for artistic reasons, that the justification for your misery stemmed solely from the requirements of a novel that wasn’t even your own? You’d be furious, more furious even than you were when you thought she’d landed on you out of the blue.

But I’m fixed forever as what you’ve made me—among other things, as a young writer without parental support. Whether you ever were what you claim to have been is another matter and requires some investigating. What one chooses to reveal in fiction is governed by a motive fundamentally aesthetic; we judge the author of a novel by how well he or she tells the story. But we judge morally the author of an autobiography, whose governing motive is primarily ethical as against aesthetic. How close is the narration to the truth? Is the author hiding his or her motives, presenting his or her actions and thoughts to lay bare the essential nature of conditions or trying to hide something, telling in order
not
to tell? In a way we always tell in order also not to tell, but the personal historian is expected to resist to the utmost the ordinary impulse to falsify, distort, and deny. Is this really “you” or is it what you want to look like to your readers at the age of fifty-five? You tell me in your letter that the book feels like the first thing you have ever written “unconsciously.” Do you mean that
The Facts
is an unconscious work of fiction? Are you not aware yourself of its fiction-making tricks? Think of the exclusions, the selective nature of it, the very pose of fact-facer. Is all this manipulation truly unconscious or is it pretending to be unconscious?

I think I am able to understand the plan here despite my opposition to your publishing the book. In somewhat autonomous essays, each about a different area in which you pushed against something, you’re remembering those forces in your early life that have given your fiction its character and also reflecting on the relationship between what happens in a life and what happens when you write about it—how close to life it sometimes is and how far from life it sometimes is. You see your writing as evolving out of three things. First, there’s your journey from Weequahic Jewishness into the bigger American society. This business of being able to be an American was always problematic for your parents’ generation, and you sensed the difference between yourself and those who had preceded you—a difference that wouldn’t have been a factor in the artistic evolution of, say, a young James Jones. You developed all the self-consciousness of someone confronted with the choices of rising up out of an ethnic group. That sense of being part of America merges in all sorts of ways with your personality. Second, there was the terrific upheaval of the involvement with Josie and the self-consciousness this ignited about your inner weaknesses as a man. Third, as far as I can make it out, there’s your response to the larger world, beginning with your boyhood awareness of World War II, Metropolitan Life, and gentile Newark and culminating in the turbulence of the sixties in New York, particularly the outcry there against the Vietnam War. The whole book seems to be leading to the point where these three forces in your life intersect, producing
Portnoy’s Complaint.
You break out of a series of safe circles—home, neighborhood, fraternity, Bucknell—you manage even to shake off the spell of the great Gayle Milman, to discover what a life is like “away.” You show us where away is, all right, but what’s driving you there you keep largely to yourself, because you either don’t know or cannot talk about it without me as your front man.

It’s as if you had worked out in your mind the formula for who you are, and this is it. Very neat—but where’s the struggle, the
struggling
you? Maybe it
was
easy to get from Leslie Street to Newark Rutgers to Bucknell to Chicago, to leave the Jewish identification behind in a religious sense but retain it in an ethnic sense, to be drawn into the possibilities of goy America and feel that you have all the freedom that anyone else has. It’s one of the classic stories of twentieth-century American energy—out of an ethnic family and then made by school. But I still feel that you’re not telling all that’s going on. Because if there wasn’t a struggle, then it just doesn’t seem like Philip Roth to me. It could be anybody, almost.

There’s an awful lot of loving gentleness in those opening chapters of yours, a tone of reconciliation that strikes me as suspiciously unsubstantiated and so unlike what you usually do. At one point I thought the book should be called
Goodbye Letting Go Being Good.
Are we to believe that this warm, comforting home portrayed there is the home that nurtured the author of
Portnoy’s Complaint?
Strange lack of logic in that, but then creation is not logical. Could I honestly tell you that I dislike the prologue? A subdued and honorable and respectful tribute to a striving, conscientious, determined father—how can I be against that? Or against the fact that you find yourself bowled over, at the verge of tears with your feelings for this eighty-six-year-old man. This is the incredible drama that nearly all of us encounter in relation to our families. The gallantry and misery of your father as he approaches death has so tenderized you, so opened you up, that
all
these recollections seem to flow from that source. And as for the final paragraph about your animal love for your mother? Quite beautiful. Your Jewish readers are finally going to glean from this what they’ve wanted to hear from you for three decades. That your parents had a good son who loved them. And what’s no less laudable, what goes hand in hand with the confession of filial love, is that instead of writing only about Jews at one another’s throats, you have discovered gentile anti-Semitism, and are exposing
that
for a change.

Of course, all that’s been there and apparent right along, even if not to them; but what they need is just this, your separating the facts from the imagination and emptying them of their potential dramatic energy. But why suppress the imagination that’s served you so long? Doing so entails terrific discipline, I know, but why bother? Especially when to strip away the imagination to get to a fiction’s factual basis is frequently all that many readers really care about anyway. Why is it that when they talk about the facts they feel they’re on more solid ground than when they talk about the fiction? The truth is that the facts are much more refractory and unmanageable and inconclusive, and can actually kill the very sort of inquiry that imagination opens up. Your work has always been to intertwine the facts
with
the imagination, but here you’re unintertwining them, you’re pulling them apart, you’re peeling the skin off your imagination,
de
-imagining a life’s work, and what is left even they can now understand. Thirty years ago, the “good” boy is thought of as bad and thereby given enormous freedom to
be
bad; now, when the same people read those opening sections, the bad boy is going to be perceived as good, and you will be given the kindliest reception. Well, maybe that’ll convince you better than I ever could to go back to being bad; it should.

Of course, by projecting essentially fictional characters with manic personae out into the world, you openly invited misunderstanding about yourself. But because some people get it wrong and don’t have any idea of who or what you really are doesn’t suggest to me that you have to straighten them out. Just the opposite—consider having tricked them into those beliefs a
success;
that’s what fiction’s
supposed
to do. The way things stand you’re no worse off than most people, who, as you know, often are to be heard mumbling aloud, “Nobody understands me or knows my great worth—nobody knows what I’m really like underneath!” For a novelist, that predicament is to be cherished. All you need as a writer is to be loved and forgiven by all the people who have been telling you for years to clean up your act—if there’s anything that can put the kibosh on a literary career, it’s the loving forgiveness of one’s natural enemies. Let them keep reminding their friends not to read you—you just keep coming back at them with your imagination, and give up on giving them, thirty years too late, the speech of the good boy at the synagogue. The whole point about your fiction (and in America, not only yours) is that the imagination is always in transit between the good boy
and
the bad boy—that’s the tension that leads to revelation.