My Life as a Man (17 page)
Authors: Philip Roth
II
My True Story
Peter Tarnopol was
b
orn in Yonkers, New Yo
rk, thirty-four years ago. He w
as educated in pu
b
lic schools there, and was graduated summa cum laude from Brown University in
1954. He
briefly attended graduate school, and then served for two years as an MP with the U.S. Army in Frankfurt, Germany, the setting for
A Jewish Father,
the first novel for which in 1
960 he received the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Since then he has published only a handful of stories, devoting himself almost exclusively in the interv
ening years to his nightmarish
marriage to the former Maureen Johnson of Elmira, New York. In her lifetime, Mrs. Tarnopol was a barmaid, an abstract painter, a sculptress, a waitress, an actress (and what an actress
)
, a short-story writer, a liar, and a psychopath. Married in
1959,
the Tarnopols were legally separated in 1
962
, at which time Mrs. Tarnopol accused the author, before Judge Milton Rosenzweig of the Supreme Court of the County of New York, of being
“
a well-known seducer of college girls.
”
(
Mr. Tarnopol has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin and lately at
Hofstra College on Long Island.
) The marriage was dissolved in
1966
by Mrs. Tarnopol
’
s violent death. At the time of her demise she was unemployed and a patient in gr
oup therapy in Manhattan; she w
as receiving one hundred dollars a week in alimony.
From
1963
to 1966, Mr. Tarnopol conducted a love affair with Susan Seabury McCall, herself a young widow residing in Manhattan; upon the conclusion of the affair, Mrs. McCall attempted unsuccessfully to kill herself and is currently living unhappily in Princeton, New Jersey, with a mother she cannot abide, hike Mr. Tarnopol, Mrs. McCall has no children, but would very much like to before time runs out, sired preferably by Mr. Tarnopol. Mr. Tarnopol is frightened of remarrying, among other things.
From 1962 until 1967, Mr. Tarnopol was the patient of the psychoanalyst Dr. Otto Spielvogel of New York City, whose articles on creativity and neurosis have appeared in numerous journals, most notably the
American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies,
of which he is a contributing editor. Mr. Tarnopol is considered by Dr. Spielvogel to be among the nation
’
s top young narcissists in the arts. Six months ago Mr. Tarnopol terminated his analysis with Dr. Spielvogel and went on leave from the university in order to take up temporary residence at the Quahsay Colony, a foundation-supported retreat for writers, painters, sculptors, and composers in rural Vermont. There Mr. Tarnopol keeps mostly to himself, devoting nights as well as days to considering what has become of his life. He is confused and incredulous much of the time, and on the subject of the late Mrs. Tarnopol, he continues to
b
e a man possessed.
Presently Mr. Tarnopol is preparing to forsake the art of fiction for a while and embark upon an autobiographical narrative, an endeavor which he approaches warily, uncertain as to both its advisability and usefulness. Not only would the publication of such a personal document raise serious legal and ethical problems, but there is no reason to believe that by keep-ing his imagination at bay and rigorously adhering to the facts, Mr. Tarnopol will have exorcised his obsession once and for all. It remains to be seen whether his candor, such as it is, can serve any better than his art (or Dr. Spielvogel
’
s therapeutic
devices) to demystify the fast and mitigate his admittedly un-commendable sense of defeat.
P.
T.
Quahsay
, Vt.
September
1967
1.
Peppy
Has anything changed?
I ask, recognizing that on the surface (which is not to be disparaged—I live there too) there is no comparing the thirty-four-year-old man able today to manage his misfortunes without collapse, to the twenty-nine-year-old boy who back in the summer of 1962 actually contemplated, however fleetingly, killing himself. On the June afternoon that I first stepped into Dr. Spielvogel
’
s office, I don
’
t
think
a minute elapsed before I had given up all pretense of being an
“
integrated
”
personality and begun to weep into my hands, grieving for the loss of my strength, my confidence, and my future. I was then (miraculously, I am no longer) married to a woman I loathed, but from whom I was unable to separate myself, subjugated not simply by her extremely professional brand of moral blackmail—by that mix of luridness and corn that made our life together resemble something serialized on afternoon TV or in the
National Enquirer—
but by my own childish availability to it. Just two months back I had learned of the ingenious strategy by which she had deceived me into marrying her three years earlier; instead of serving me as the weapon with which finally to beat my way out of our bedlam, what she had confessed (in the midst of her semiannual suicide attempt) seemed to have stripped me of my remaining defenses and illusions. My mortification was complete. Neither leaving nor staying meant anything to me any more.
When I came East that June from Wisconsin, ostensibly to participate as a staff member in a two-week writing workshop at Brooklyn College, I was as bereft of will as a zombie—except, as I discovered, the will to be done with my life. Waiting in the subway station for an approaching train, I suddenly found it advisable to wrap one hand around the links of a chain
that
anchored a battered penny weighing machine to the iron pillar beside me. Until the train had passed in and out of view, I squeezed that chain with all my strength.
“
I am dangling over a ravine,
”
I told myself.
“
I am being hoisted from the waves by a helicopter.
Hang on!
”
Afterward I scanned the tracks, to be certain that I had in fact succeeded in stifling
this
wholly original urge for Peter Tarnopol to be transformed into a mangled corpse; amazed, terrified, I had also, as they say, to laugh:
“
Commit suicide? Are you kidding? You can
’
t even walk out the door.
”
I still don
’
t know how near I may actually have come that day to springing across the platform and, in lieu of taking my wife head-on, taking on that incoming IRT train. It could be that I didn
’
t have to
cling
to anything, that too could have been so much infantile posturing; then again I may owe my survival to the fact that when I heard blessed oblivion hurtling my way, my right hand fortunately found something impressively durable to hang on to.
At Brooklyn College over a hundred students were present in the auditorium for the opening session; each member of the workshop staff of four was to give a fifteen-minute address on
“
the art of fiction.
”
My turn came, I rose—and couldn
’
t speak. I stood at the lectern, notes before
me—audience
before me— without air in my lungs or saliva in my mouth. The audience, as I remember it, seemed to me to begin to
hum.
And all I wanted was to go to sleep. Somehow I didn
’
t close my eyes and give it a try.
Neither
was I entirely there. I was nothing but heartbeat, just that drum. Eventually I turned and left the stage
…
and the job
…
Once, in Wisconsin, after a weekend of quarreling with my wife (she maintained,
over my objections, that I had
talked too long to a pretty graduate student at a party on Friday night; much discussion on the relativity of time), she had presented herself at the door of the classroom where I taught my undergraduate fiction seminar from seven to nine on Monday evenings. Our quarrel had ended at breakfast that morning with Maureen tearing at my hands with her fingernails; I had not been back to our apartment since.
“
It
’
s an emergency!
”
Maureen informed me—and the seminar. The ten middle western undergraduates looked first at her, standing so determinedly there in the doorway, and then with comprehension at my hands, marked with mercurochrome
—“
The cat,
”
I had explained to them earlier, with a forgiving smile for that imaginary beast. I rushed out into the corridor before Maureen had a chance to say more. There my sovereign delivered herself of that day
’
s manifesto:
“
You better come home tonight, Peter! You better not go back to some room somewhere with one of those little blondes!
”
(This was the semester before I went ahead and did just that.)
“
Get out of here!
”
I whispered.
“
Go, Maureen, or I
’
ll throw you down those fucking stairs! Go,
b
efore I murder you
!
”
My tone must have impressed her—she took hold of the banister and retreated a step. I turned back to the seminar room to find that in my haste to confront Maureen and send her packing, I had neglected to shut the door behind me. A big shy farm girl from Appleton, who had spoken maybe one sentence all semester, was staring fixedly at the woman in the corridor behind me; the rest of the class stared into the pages of
Death in Venice—no
book had ever been so riveting.
“
All right,
”
said the quavering voice that entered the room—an arm had violen
tly
flung the door shut in Maureen
’
s face, I
’
m not wholly sure it was mine—
“
why does Mann send Aschenback to Venice, rather than Paris, or Rome, or Chicago?
”
Here the girl from Appleton dissolved into tears, and the others, usually not
that
lively, began answering the question all at once
…
I did not recall every last detail of this scene as I stood yearning for sleep before my expectant audience at Brooklyn College, but it account
s, I think, for the vision that
I had as I stepped to the lectern to deliver my prepared address: I saw Maureen, projected like a bullet through the rear door of the auditorium, and shouting at the top of her lungs whatever revelation about me had just rolled off the presses. Yes, to that workshop audience that took me to be an emerging literary figure, a first novelist whose ideas about writing were worth paying tuition to hear, Maureen would reveal (without charge) that I was not at all as I would present myself. To whatever words, banal or otherwise, that I spoke from the platform, she would cry,
“
Lies! Filthy, self-serving lies!
”
I could (as I intended to) quote Conrad, Flaubert, Henry James, she would scream all the louder,
“
Fraud!
”
But I spoke not a syllable, and in my flight from the stage, seemed to be only what I was—terrified, nothing any longer but my fears.
My writing by this time was wholly at the mercy of our marital confusion. Five and six hours a day, seven days a week, I went off to my office at the university and ran paper through the roller of my typewriter; the fiction that emerged was either amateurishly transparent—I might have been drawing up an IOU or writing the instructions for the back of a detergent box for all
the
imagination I displayed—or, alternately, so disjointed and opaque that on rereading, I was myself in the dark, and manuscript in hand, would drag myself around the little room, like some burdened figure broken loose from Rodin
’
s
“
Bourgeois of Calais,
”
crying aloud,
“
Where was I when this was written?
”
And I asked because I didn
’
t know.
These pounds and pounds of pages that I accumulated during
the
marriage had
the
marriage itself as the subject and constituted the major part of the daily effort to understand how I had fallen into this trap and why I couldn
’
t get out. Over the three years I had tried easily a hundred different ways to penetrate that mystery; every other week the whole course of the novel would change in midsentence, and within any one
month
the surface of my desk would disappear beneath dozens of equally dissatisfying variants of the sin
gle unfinished chapter that was
driving me mad. Periodically I would take all these pages
—“
take
”
is putting it mildly—and consign them to the liquor carton filling up with false starts at the bottom of my closet, and then I would begin again, often with the very first sentence of the book. How I struggled for a description. (And, alas, struggle still.) But from one version to the next nothing of consequence ever happened: locales shifted, peripheral characters (parents, old flames, comforters, enemies, and allies) came and went, and with about as much hope for success as a man attacking the polar ice cap with his own warm breath, I would attempt to release a flow of invention in me by changing the color of her eyes or my hair. Of course, to give up the obsession would surely have made the most sense; only, obsessed, I was as incapable of not writing about what was killing me as I was of altering or understanding it.