Operation Shylock: A Confession (2 page)

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The calls from Israel had reached me at the two-room Manhattan hotel suite where my wife and I had been living for nearly five months, as though aground on the dividing line between past and future. The impersonality of big-city hotel life was most uncongenial to the domestic instinct so strong in both of us, yet ill-equipped though we were to be displaced and to be living together in this uprooted, unfamiliar way, it was preferable for the time being to our returning to the Connecticut farmhouse where, during the previous spring and early summer, while Claire stood helplessly by, fearing the worst, I had barely made it through the most harrowing exigency of my life. Half a mile from the nearest neighbor’s dwelling and encompassed by woods and open fields at the end of a long dirt road, that large, secluded old house whose setting had for over fifteen years furnished just the isolation my concentration required had become the eerie backdrop for a bizarre emotional collapse; that cozy clapboard sanctuary, with its wide chestnut floorboards and worn easy chairs, a place where books were piled everywhere and a log fire burned high in the hearth most every night, had suddenly become a hideous asylum confining side by side one abominable lunatic and one bewildered keeper. A place I loved had come to fill me with dread, and I found myself reluctant to resume our residence there even after we’d mislaid these five months as hotel refugees and my familiar industrious personality had drifted back to take the reins and
set me again to trotting reliably enough along the good old rut of my life. (Drifted back tentatively at the start, by no means convinced that things were as secure as they had seemed before; drifted back rather the way the work force standing out in the street drifts back into an office building that has been temporarily cleared because of a bomb scare.)

What had happened was this:

In the aftermath of minor knee surgery, my pain, instead of diminishing as the weeks passed, got worse and worse, far exceeding the prolonged discomfort that had prompted me to decide on surgery in the first place. When I went to see my young surgeon about the worsening condition, he merely said, “This happens sometimes,” and, claiming to have warned me beforehand that the operation might not work, dismissed me as his patient. I was left with only some pills to mitigate my astonishment and manage the pain. Such a surprising outcome from a brief outpatient procedure might have made anyone angry and despondent; what happened in my case was worse.

My mind began to disintegrate. The word DISINTEGRATION seemed itself to be the matter out of which my brain was constituted, and it began spontaneously coming apart. The fourteen letters, big, chunky, irregularly sized components of my brain, elaborately intertwined, tore jaggedly loose from one another, sometimes a fragment of a letter at a time, but usually in painfully unpronounceable nonsyllabic segments of two or three, their edges roughly serrated. This mental coming apart was as distinctly physical a reality as a tooth being pulled, and the agony of it was excruciating.

Hallucinations like these and worse stampeded through me day and night, a herd of wild animals I could do nothing to stop. I couldn’t stop anything, my will blotted out by the magnitude of the tiniest, most idiotic thought. Two, three, four times a day, without provocation or warning, I’d begin to cry. It didn’t matter if I was alone in my studio, turning the page of yet another book that I couldn’t read, or at dinner with Claire, looking hopelessly at the food she’d prepared that I couldn’t find any reason to eat—I cried. I cried before friends, before strangers; even sitting alone on the toilet I would dissolve,
wring myself dry with tears, an outpouring of tears that left me feeling absolutely raw—shorn by tears of five decades of living, my inmost being lay revealed to everyone in all its sickly puniness.

I could not forget my shirtsleeves for two minutes at a time. I couldn’t seem to prevent myself from feverishly rolling up my shirtsleeves and then rolling them down just as feverishly and meticulously buttoning the cuff, only immediately to unbutton the cuff and begin the meaningless procedure once more, as though its meaning went, in fact, to the core of my existence. I couldn’t stop flinging open the windows and then, when my claustrophobic fit had given way to chills, banging them shut as though it were not I but someone else who had flung them all open. My pulse rate would shoot up to 120 beats a minute even while I sat, brain-dead, in front of the nightly TV news, a corpse but for a violently thumping heart that had taken to keeping time to a clock ticking twice as fast as any on earth. That was another manifestation of the panic that I could do nothing to control: panic sporadically throughout the day and then without letup, titanically, at night.

I dreaded the hours of darkness. Climbing the obstacle course of stairs to our bedroom one painful step at a time—bending the good leg, dragging the bad leg—I felt myself on the way to a torture session that this time I couldn’t survive. My only chance of getting through to daylight without having my mind come completely apart was to hook hold of a talismanic image out of my most innocent past and try to ride out the menace of the long night lashed to the mast of that recollection. One that I worked hysterically hard, in a kind of convulsion of yearning, to summon forth to save me was of my older brother guiding me along our street of rooming houses and summer cottages to the boardwalk and down the flight of wooden steps to the beach at the Jersey shore town where our family rented a room for a month each summer.
Take me, Sandy, please
. When I thought (oftentimes mistakenly) that Claire was asleep, I would chant this incantation aloud, four childish words that I had not uttered so passionately, if ever at all, since 1938, when I was five and my attentive, protective brother was ten.

I wouldn’t let Claire draw the shades at night, because I had to know the sun was rising the very second that sunrise began; but each morning, when the panes began to lighten in the east-facing windows just to the side of where I lay, whatever relief I felt from my terror of the night that had just ended was copiously displaced by my terror of the day about to begin. Night was interminable and unbearable, day was interminable and unbearable, and when I reached into my pillbox for the capsule that was supposed to carve a little hole where I could hide for a few hours from all the pain that was stalking me, I couldn’t believe (though I had no choice but to believe) that the fingers trembling in the pillbox were mine. “Where’s Philip?” I said hollowly to Claire while I stood gripping her hand at the edge of the pool. For summers on end I had swum regularly in this pool for thirty minutes at the end of each day; now I was fearful of even putting in a toe, overwhelmed by the pretty, summery surface sheen of those thousands of gallons of water in which I was sure to be sucked under for good. “Where is Philip Roth?” I asked aloud. “Where did he go?” I was not speaking histrionically. I asked because I wanted to know.

This and more like it lasted one hundred days and one hundred nights. If anyone had telephoned then to say that Philip Roth had been spotted at a war-crimes trial in Jerusalem or was advertised in the Jerusalem paper as lecturing at the King David Hotel on the only solution to the Jewish problem, I can’t imagine what I would have done. As thoroughly enveloped as I was in the disaster of self-abandonment, it might have furnished corroboratory evidence just unhinging enough to convince me to go ahead and commit suicide. Because I thought about killing myself all the time. Usually I thought of drowning: in the little pond across the road from the house … if I weren’t so horrified of the water snakes there nibbling at my corpse; in the picturesque big lake only a few miles away … if I weren’t so frightened of driving out there alone. When we came to New York that May for me to receive an honorary degree from Columbia, I opened the window of our fourteenth-floor hotel room after Claire had momentarily gone downstairs to the drugstore and, leaning as far out over the interior courtyard as I could while still holding tight to
the sill, I told myself, “Do it. No snakes to stop you now.” But there was my father to stop me now; he was coming from New Jersey the next day to see me get my degree. Jokingly on the phone he’d taken to calling me “Doctor,” just as he’d done on the previous occasions when I was about to receive one of these things. I’d wait to jump until after he went home.

At Columbia, facing from the platform the several thousand people gathered festively together in the big sunny library plaza to watch the commencement exercises, I was convinced that I couldn’t make it through the afternoon-long ceremony without beginning either to scream aloud or to sob uncontrollably. I’ll never know how I got through that day or through the dinner welcoming the honorary-degree candidates the evening before without letting on to everybody who saw me that I was a man who was finished and about to prove it. Nor will I ever know what I might have gone ahead to do halfway out the hotel window that morning or even on the platform the next day, had I not been able to interpose between my denuded self and its clamorous longing for obliteration the devotion linking me to an eighty-six-year-old father whose life my death by suicide would smash to smithereens.

After the ceremony at Columbia, my father came back to the hotel with us for a cup of coffee. He’d surmised weeks before that something was critically wrong even though I insisted, when we saw each other or spoke on the phone, that it was only the persistence of the physical pain that was getting me down. “You look drained,” he said, “you look awful.” How I looked had made his own face go ashen—and he was as yet suffering from no fatal disease, as far as anyone knew. “Knee,” I replied. “Hurts.” And said no more. “This isn’t like you, Phil, you take everything in your stride.” I smiled. “I do?” “Here,” he said, “open it when you get home,” and he handed me a package that I could tell he had encased himself in its bulky brown-paper wrapping. He said, “To go with your new degree, Doctor.”

What he gave me was a framed five-by-seven portrait photo taken by a Metropolitan Life photographer some forty-five years earlier, on the occasion of my father’s Newark district’s winning one of the
company’s coveted sales awards. There, as I could barely remember him now, was the striving, undeflectable insurance man out of my early grade school years, conventionally stolid-looking in the American style of the Depression era: neatly knotted conservative tie; double-breasted business suit; thinning hair closely cut; level, steady gaze; congenial, sober, restrained smile—the man that the boss wants on his team and that the customer can believe is a balanced person, a card-carrying member of the everyday world. “Trust me,” the face in the portrait proclaimed. “Work me. Promote me. You will not be let down.”

When I telephoned from Connecticut the next morning, planning to tell him all too truthfully how the gift of that old picture had buoyed me, my father suddenly heard his fifty-four-year-old son sobbing as he hadn’t sobbed since his infancy. I was astonished by how unalarmed his reaction was to what must have sounded like nothing short of a complete collapse. “Go ahead,” he said, as though he knew everything I’d been hiding from him and, just because he knew everything, had decided, seemingly out of the blue, to give me that photograph picturing him at his most steadfast and determined. “Let it all out,” he said very softly, “whatever it is, let it all come out.…”

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I’m told that all the misery I’ve just described was caused by the sleeping pill that I was taking every night, the benzodiazepine triazolam marketed as Halcion, the pill that has lately begun to be charged with driving people crazy all over the globe. In Holland, distribution of Halcion had been prohibited entirely since 1979, two years after it was introduced there and eight years before it was prescribed for me; in France and Germany, doses of the size I was taking nightly had been removed from the pharmacies in the 1980s; and in Britain it was banned outright following a BBC television exposé aired in the fall of 1991.
The
revelation—which came as less than a revelation to someone like me—occurred in January 1992, with a long article in
The New York Times
whose opening paragraphs were featured prominently on the front page. “For two decades,” the piece began, “the
drug company that makes Halcion, the world’s best-selling sleeping pill, concealed data from the Food and Drug Administration showing that it caused significant numbers of serious psychiatric side effects.…”

It was eighteen months after my breakdown that I first read a comprehensive indictment of Halcion—and a description of what the author called “Halcion madness”—in a popular American magazine. The article quoted from a letter in
The Lancet
, the British medical journal, in which a Dutch psychiatrist listed symptoms associated with Halcion that he had discovered in a study of psychiatric patients who had been prescribed the drug; the list read like a textbook summary of my catastrophe: “… severe malaise; depersonalization and derealization; paranoid reactions; acute and chronic anxiety; continuous fear of going insane; … patients often feel desperate and have to fight an almost irresistible impulse to commit suicide. I know of one patient who did commit suicide.”

It was only through a lucky break that instead of having eventually to be hospitalized myself—or perhaps even buried—I came to withdraw from Halcion and my symptoms began to subside and disappear. One weekend early in the summer of 1987, my friend Bernie Avishai drove down from Boston to visit me after having become alarmed by my suicidal maunderings over the phone. I was by then three months into the suffering and I told him, when we were alone together in my studio, that I had decided to commit myself to a mental institution. Holding me back, however, was my fear that once I went in I’d never come out. Somebody had to convince me otherwise—I wanted Bernie to. He interrupted to ask a question whose irrelevance irritated me terribly: “What are you on?” I reminded him that I didn’t take drugs and was “on” nothing, only some pills to help me sleep and to calm me down. Angered by his failure to grasp the severity of my situation, I confessed the shameful truth about myself as forthrightly as I could. “I’ve cracked up. I’ve broken down. Your friend here is mentally ill!” “Which pills?” he replied.