The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (11 page)

Our evenings in Josie’s apartment signaled to me that the aspiration that had carried me away from Newark and off to Bucknell at eighteen had been triumphantly realized at twenty-three (despite the fact that I was still a student and, except for my year in the Army, had been one since I was five): I was at last a man. It may be that why I dropped out of the Ph.D. program after little more than one quarter, why sitting in a class answering questions and going home to study for still more exams were all at once unendurable, had to do not just with deciding (largely because of my Martha Foley story) to stake my long-term future on writing fiction but with having gained the majority that I’d always known to be the goal of my education. At twenty-three I was independent of my family, though I still phoned them a couple of times a month, wrote occasional letters, and made the trek East at Christmastime to see them; I was settled into a desirable if tedious teaching position at a prestigious university in a city neighborhood where there were lots of secondhand bookstores and plenty of original intellectual types; and above all, I was conducting my first semidomesticated love affair where—even though their spectral presence was gigantic—nobody’s parents were actually nearby, a love affair with a woman even more profoundly on her own than I was. That she was four years older than I seemed only further evidence of my maturity: our seemingly incompatible backgrounds attested to my freedom from the pressure of convention and my complete emancipation from the constraining boundaries protecting my preadult life. I was not only a man, I was a free man.

I thought then that I couldn’t have found a more exhilarating intellectual arena than the University of Chicago in which to exercise my freedom to its utmost. After being discharged from the Army in August, I’d gone up to New York to begin looking for a job. Charlotte Maurer helped get me an interview at the
New Yorker,
and through the influence of the novelist Charles Jackson, who wrote copy at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where my brother was then an art director, I had gotten to see Roger Straus, Jackson’s publisher, who twenty years later became my own publisher. A few days after the interviews, I was elated to find myself being offered two jobs—as a copy editor at Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy and as a checker at the
New Yorker.
Before I could choose between them, however, a telegram arrived unexpectedly from Napier Wilt, a former teacher of mine and dean of humanities at Chicago; at the last minute a position had opened up on the freshman composition staff of the college, and Wilt was asking if I was interested in joining the Chicago faculty as an instructor in September.

Not only did I consider university teaching worthwhile, interesting work, but it was clear that of the three jobs the instructorship would afford the most opportunity to write: even with three composition sections, each meeting five hours a week, I’d still have as much as half of each day left for myself, and then there’d be quarterly breaks, periodic holidays, and summer vacations. All that free time was particularly appealing after my claustrophobic months in the Army. Following basic training at Fort Dix, I’d been assigned to Washington to serve as a private writing news handouts for the public-information officer of Walter Reed Army Hospital. (Because of a back injury sustained at Dix, I eventually wound up a patient in the hospital and, after two months in bed there, was released from the service with a medical discharge.) Working in the public-information office for more than half a year provided my first taste of the tedium of a nine-to-five job; the work was hardly demanding, but there were still days when being cooped up for eight hours, mindlessly banging a typewriter, nearly drove me nuts. Consequently, once I was free of the Army enclosure, I seized on this chance to rise from former graduate student to university instructor and to return to Chicago, once again to argue about books and theorize to my heart’s content about literature and, what’s more, to live on practically nothing (that’s about what the job paid) without feeling like a pauper, which you could do in those days around a university. In 1956, at twenty-three, I saw the University of Chicago as the best place in America to enjoy maximum personal freedom, to find intellectual liveliness, and to stand, if not necessarily in rebellious opposition, at least at a heartening distance from the prospering society’s engrossment with consuming goods and watching TV.

*   *   *

E
VER SINCE THE SUMMER
of my Bucknell graduation I’d been carrying in my wallet the photograph of a college student from suburban north Jersey, a Jewish girl whose family history and personal prospects couldn’t have been less like Josie’s; she was quick-witted, intelligent, and vivacious, quite pretty, and possessed of the confidence that’s often the patrimony of a young woman adored since birth by a virile, trustworthy, successful father. Harry Milman, Gayle’s father, made not the slightest attempt to disguise the impassioned pride he took in his four children, toward whom he was unfailingly affectionate and generous; he was a hard-driving, rough-hewn businessman, like my own father out of Jewish immigrant Newark, and in those years when Gayle was still his loving dependent daughter, he loomed in the background of her life as an impressively protective figure. The bond to her mother, a very good-looking woman in her early fifties, had by then begun to chafe an adventurous girl of eighteen and nineteen, yet the relationship, if at times strained, was never in real danger of deteriorating into anything unmanageably painful. The hallmarks of the family were solidarity and confidence. Could Josie have been disarmed of her resentful defiance and permitted to press her nose up against the glass of the picture window of the Milmans’ large suburban house, she might well have stood there weeping with envy and wishing with all her heart to have been transformed into Gayle. She magically sought something approximating that implausible metamorphosis by deciding to marry me against all reasonable resistance and, on top of that, to become a Jew.

“Oh,” cries Peter Tarnopol in
My Life as a Man,
pining for the Sarah Lawrence senior whom he’d cast off in favor of his angry nemesis, “why did I forsake Dina Dornbusch—for Maureen!” Why did
I
forsake Gayle for Josephine Jensen? Over a period of some two years, while I was in graduate school and in the Army, Gayle and I were equally caught up by an obsessional passion yet, returning to Chicago in September 1956, I thought my voyage out—wherever it might be taking me—could no longer be impeded by this affair, which, as I saw it, had inevitably to resolve into a marriage linking me with the safe enclosure of Jewish New Jersey. I wanted a harder test, to work at life under more difficult conditions.

The joke on me was that Gayle had an enigmatic adventure of her own to undertake and, after graduating from college, propelled by the very gusto and self-assurance that had germinated in the haven of her father’s hothouse, for over a decade led a single life in Europe whose delights had little in common with the pleasures of her conventional upbringing. From the stories that reached me through mutual friends, it sounded as though Harry Milman’s daughter had become the most desirable woman of
any
nationality between the Berlin Wall and the English Channel; meanwhile, the outward-bound voyager who refused to curb his precious independence by even the shadow of a connection with the provincial world he’d outgrown had sealed himself into a joyless existence, rife with the most preposterous, humanly meaningless responsibilities.

I had got everything backward. Josie, with her chaotic history, seemed to me a woman of courage and strength for having survived that awful background. Gayle, on the other hand, because of all that family security and all that father love, seemed to me a girl whose comfortable upbringing would keep her a girl forever. Gayle would be dependent because of her nurturing background and Josie would be independent because of her broken background! Could I have been any more naïve? Not neurotic, naïve, because that’s true about us too: very naïve, even the brightest, and not just as youngsters either.

*   *   *

T
HREE CLOSE FRIENDSHIPS
that I made at the university during my first months back in Chicago were with the novelists Richard Stern and Thomas Rogers and the critic and editor Ted Solotaroff. The three of them were four to five years older than I and already married—Dick and Ted each had a couple of small children—but we were all still only in our twenties and wanted to be writers. Dick and Tom were new members of the U of C faculty, while Ted was teaching evening classes down at an Indiana University extension in Gary and studying as I was in the Chicago Ph.D. program. Josie and I would see the Sterns or the Rogerses or the Solotaroffs fairly regularly for dinner or a poker game or a beer, and the camaraderie made us seem something like a married couple ourselves, even if I was more aware than ever, particularly from the example of Ted’s difficult life and the obvious strain that a family imposed on his time to write and to pursue his degree, that for financial reasons alone my own writing ambition would best be served by being responsible for only myself. Though my salary was $2,800 a year, I was still trying to save toward the European journey that seemed to me very much a part of a literary apprenticeship. I was almost certain that I could never expect to live on my earnings as a writer, even if eventually I came to be published in large-circulation magazines as well as in the literary quarterlies that were my natural home in those days. It went without saying (certainly at the University of Chicago) that one did not write in the
expectation
of making money. I thought that if I was ever pressed to write for money, I wouldn’t be able to write at all.

During the first months Josie and I were together I talked much of the time about writing, bought her my favorite paperbacks, loaned her heavily underlined Modern Library copies of the classics, read aloud pages from the novelists I admired, and began after a while to show her the manuscripts of the stories I was working on. When I was asked to contribute movie reviews to the
New Republic
at $25 a shot (a job offered to me as a result of a little satire about Eisenhower’s evening prayer that the
New Republic
had reprinted from the
Chicago Review
), we went to the films together and talked about them on the way home. Over dinner we educated each other about those dissimilar American places from which we’d emerged, she badly impeded and vulnerable—and only now sufficiently free to try valiantly to recover her equilibrium and make a new life as an independent woman—and I, from the look of it, fortified, intact, and hungry for literary distinction. The stories I told of my protected childhood might have been Othello’s tales about the men with heads beneath their shoulders, so tantalized was she by the atmosphere of secure, dependable comfort that I ascribed to my mother’s genius for managing our household affairs and to the dutiful perseverance of both my parents even in their years of financial strain. I spoke of the artistry practiced within my mother’s kitchen with no less enthusiasm than when I enlightened her about the sensuous accuracy of
Madame Bovary.
Because the grade and high schools I attended had been virtually down the street from our house, I had as a boy gone home for lunch every day—the result, I told her, was that after I’d returned from teaching my morning classes and changed from my new suit into my old writing clothes the first whiff of Campbell’s tomato soup heating up in the kitchen of my little Chicago flat could still arouse the coziest sense of anticipation and imminent, satisfying consummation, yielding what I had only recently learned to recognize as a “Proustian” thrill (despite my inability during consecutive summers to get beyond page 60 of
Swann’s Way
).

Was I exaggerating? Did I idealize? I don’t know—did Othello? Winning a new woman with one’s narratives, one tends not to worry about what I once heard an Englishman describe as “overegging the custard.” I think now that what encouraged me to disclose in such loving detail a memory I wouldn’t have dreamed of exploiting while wooing a confident, well-brought-up girl like Polly Bates, whose faith in her origins was unchallengeable—and that would have been entirely beside the point with Gayle Milman, the daughter of a Jewish household far more of a lotus land to its offspring than my own—was an innate taste for dramatic juxtaposition, an infatuation with the coupling of seemingly alien perspectives. My unbroken progress from the hands of the
mohel
to Mildred Martin, my history as the gorged beneficiary of overdevotion, overprotection, and oversurveillance within an irreproachably respectable Jewish household, was recounted in alternating sequence with her own life stories and formulated, I think, as a moral antidote to flush from her system the poisonous residue still tainting her belief in the possibilities for fulfillment. I was wooing her, I was wowing her, I was spiritedly charming her—motivated by an egoistic young lover’s predilection for intimacy and sincerity, I was telling her who I thought I was and what I believed had formed me, but I was also engaged by a compelling form of narrative responsory. I was a countervoice, an antitheme, providing a naïve challenge to the lurid view of human nature that emerged from her tales of victimized innocence, first as an only child raised from her earliest years as the not entirely welcome guest—along with her long-suffering mother and semiemployable father—in the house of her Grandfather and Stepgrandmother Hebert and then at the hands of the high school sweetheart whom she’d married and whom she had reason, she told me, to despise forever.

She would despise him forever.
I was as hypnotized—and flooded with chivalric fantasies of manly heroism—by her unforgiving hatred of all the radically imperfect gentile men who she claimed had abused her and had come close to ruining her as she was enchanted—and filled with fantasy—by my Jewish idyll of neatly ironed pajamas and hot tomato soup and what that promised about the domestication, if not the sheer feminizing, of unmuzzled maleness. The more examples she offered of their irresponsible, unprincipled conduct, the more I pitied her the injustices she had had to endure and admired the courage it had taken to survive. When she reviled them with that peculiarly potent adjective of hers, “wicked”—which I till then had associated primarily with people like the defendants at Nuremberg—the nearer I felt drawn to a world from which I no longer wished to be sheltered and about which a man in my intended line of work ought really to know something: the menacing realms of benighted American life that so far I had only read of in the novels of Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. The more graphically she illustrated their callow destructiveness of every value that my own family held dear, the more contempt I had for them and the more touching examples I provided of our exemplary history of harmlessness. I could as well have been working for the Anti-Defamation League—only instead of defending my minority from anti-Semitic assaults on their good name and their democratic rights, I cast myself as the parfit Jewish knight dispatched to save one of their own from the worst of the gentile dragons.