Authors: Philip Roth
Meanwhile Susan remains under the care of her mother in Princeton, and I remain up here, under my own.
3.
Marriage
À
la Mode
Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your hair.
—from the Grimms’ fairy tale
For those young men who reached their maturity in the fifties, and who aspired to be grown-up during that decade, when as
one participant has written, everyone
wanted
to be thirty, there was considerable moral prestige in taking a wife, and hardly because a wife was going to be one’s maidservant or “sexual object.” Decency and Maturity, a young man’s “seriousness,” were at issue precisely because it was thought to be the other way around: in that the great world was so obviously a man’s, it was only within marriage that an ordinary woman could hope to find equality and dignity. Indeed, we were led to believe by the defenders of womankind of our era that we were exploiting and degrading the women we
didn’t
marry, rather than the ones we did. Unattached and on her own, a woman was supposedly not even able to go to the movies or out to a restaurant by herself, let alone perform an appendectomy or drive a truck. It was up to us then to give them the value and the purpose that society at large withheld—by marrying them. If we didn’t marry women, who would? Ours, alas, was the only sex available for the job: the draft was on.
No wonder then that a young college-educated bourgeois male of my generation who scoffed at the idea of marriage for himself, who would just as soon eat out of cans or in cafeterias, sweep his own floor, make his own bed, and come and go with no binding legal attachments, finding female friendship and sexual adventure where and when he could and for no longer than he liked, laid himself open to the charge of “immaturity,” if not “latent” or blatant “homosexuality.” Or he was just plain “selfish.” Or he was “frightened of responsibility.” Or he could not “commit himself” (nice institutional phrase, that) to “a permanent relationship.” Worst of all, most shameful of all, the chances were that this person who thought he was perfec
tly
able to take care of himself on his own was in actuality “unable to love.”
An awful lot of worrying was done in the fifties about whether people were able to love or not—I venture to say, much of it by young women in behalf of the young men who didn’t particularly
want
them to wash their
socks and cook their meals and
bear their children and then tend them for the rest of their natural days. “But aren’t you capable of loving anyone? Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?” when translated from desperate fifties-feminese into plain English, generally meant “I want to get married and I want you to get married to.”
Now I am sure that many of the young women of that period who set themselves up as specialists in loving hadn’t a very clear idea of how strong a charge their emotions got from the instinct for survival—or how much those emotions arose out of the yearning to own and be owned, rather than from a reservoir of pure and selfless love that was the special property of themselves and their gender. After all, how lovable
are
men? Particularly men “unable to love”? No, there was more to all that talk about “commitment” and “permanent relationships” than many young women (and their chosen mates) were able to talk about or able at that time fully to understand: the more was the fact of female dependence, defenselessness, and vulnerability.
This hard fact of life was of course experienced and dealt with by women in accordance with personal endowments of intelligence and sanity and character. One imagines that there were brave and genuinely self-sacrificing decisions made by women who refused to accede to those profoundest of self-delusions, the ones that come cloaked in the guise of love; likewise, there was much misery in store for those who were never able to surrender their romantic illusions about the arrangement they had made in behalf of their helplessness, until they reached the lawyer’s office, and he threw their way that buoy known as alimony. It has been said that those ferocious alimony
battle
s that have raged in the courtrooms of this country during the last few decades, the way religious wars raged throughout Europe in the seventeenth century, were really “symbolic” in nature. My guess is that rather than serving as a symbol around which to organize other grievances and heartaches, the alimony
battle
frequently tended to clarify what was generally obscured by the metaphors with which marital arrangement
s were camouflaged by the part
ners themselves. The extent of the panic and rage aroused by the issue of alimony, the ferocity displayed by people who were otherwise sane and civilized enough, testifies, I think, to the shocking—and humiliating—realization that came to couples in the courtroom about the fundamental role that each may actually have played in the other’s life. “So, it has descended to this,” the enraged contestants might say, glaring in hatred at one another—but even that was only an attempt to continue to hide from the most humiliating fact of all: that it really
was
this, all along.
Now I realize that it is possible to dismiss these generalizations as a manifestation of my bitterness and cynicism, an unfortunate consequence of my own horrific marriage and of the affair that recently ended so unhappily. Furthermore, it can be said that, having chosen women like Maureen and Susan (or, if you prefer, having had them chosen for me by my own aberrant, if not pathological, nature), I for one should not generalize, even loosely, about what men want (and get) from women, or what women want and get out of men. Well, I grant that I do not find myself feeling very “typical” at this moment, nor am I telling this story in order to argue that my life is representative of anything; nonetheless, I am naturally interested in looking around to see how much of my experience with women has been special to me and—if you must have it that way—my pathology, and how much is symptomatic of a more extensive social malaise. And looking around, I conclude this: in Maureen and Susan I came in contact with two of the more virulent strains of a virus to which only a few women among us are immune.
Outwardly, of course, Maureen and Susan couldn’t have been more dissimilar, nor could either have had a stronger antipathy for the “type” she took the other to be. However, what drew them together as women—which is to say, what drew me to them, for that is the subject here—was that in her own extreme and vivid way, each of
these
a
ntipathetic originals demon
strated that sense of defenselessness and vulnerability that has come to be a mark of their sex and is often at the core of their relations with men. That I came to be bound to Maureen by
my
helplessness does not mean that either of us ever really stopped envisioning
her
as the helpless victim and myself as the victimizer who had only to desist in his brutishness for everything to be put right and sexual justice to be done. So strong was the myth of male inviolability, of male dominance and potency, not only in Maureen’s mind but in mine, that even when I went so far as to dress myself in a woman’s clothes and thus concede that as a man I surrendered, even
then
I could never fully assent to the idea that in our household conventional assumptions about the strong and the weak did not adequately describe the situation. Right down to the end, I still saw Maureen, and she saw herself, as the damsel in distress; and in point of fact, beneath all that tough exterior, all those claims to being “in business for herself” and nobody’s patsy, Maureen was actually more of a Susan than Susan was,
and. to herself no less than to me.
There is a growing body of opinion which maintains that by and large marriages, affairs, and sexual arrangements generally are made by masters in search of slaves: there are the dominant and
the
submissive, the brutish and the compliant, the exploiters and the exploited. What this formula fails to explain, among a million other things, is why so many of the “masters” appear themselves to be in bondage, oftentimes to their “slaves.” I do not contend—to make the point yet again—that my story furnishes anything like an explanation or a paradigm; it is only an instance, a post
-
chivalric instance to be sure, of what might be described as the Prince Charming phenomenon. In this version of the fairy tale the part of the maiden locked in the tower is played consecutively by Maureen Johnson Tarnopol and Susan Seabury McCall. I of course play the prince. My performance, as described here, may give rise to the sardonic suggestion that I should have played his horse. But,
you see, it was not as an ani
mal that I wished to be a star—it was decidedly
not
horsiness, goatishness, foxiness, lionliness, or beastliness in any form that I aspired to. I wanted to be humanish: manly, a man.
At the time when all this began, I would never even have thought it necessary to announce that as an aspiration—I was too confident at twenty-five
that
success was all but at hand—nor did I foresee a career in which being married and then trying to get unmarried would become my predominant activity and obsession. I would have laughed had anyone suggested that struggling with a woman over a marriage would come to occupy me in the way that exploring the South Pole had occupied Admiral Byrd—or writing
Madame Bovary
had occupied Flaubert. Clearly the last thing I could have imagined was myself, a dissident and skeptical member of my generation, succumbing to all that moralizing rhetoric about “permanent relationships.” And, in truth, it did take something more than the rhetoric to do me in. It took a Maureen, wielding it. Yet the humbling fact remains: when the dissident and skeptical member of his generation was done in, it was on the same grounds as just about everyone else.
I was fooled by appearances, largely my own.
As a young writer already publishing stories in literary quarterlies, as one who resided in a Lower East Side basement apartment between Second Avenue and the Bowery, living on army savings and a twelve-hundred-dollar publisher’s advance that I doled out to myself at thirty dollars a week, I did not think of myself as an ordinary or conventional university graduate of those times. My college acquaintances were all off becoming lawyers and doctors; a few who had been friends on the Brown literary magazine were working on advanced degrees in literature—prior to my induction into the army, I had myself served a year and a half in the Ph.D. program at
the
University of Chicago, before falling by the wayside, a casualty of “Bibliography” and “Anglo-Saxon”; the
rest—the fraternity boys, the
athletes, the business majors, those with whom I’d had little association at school—were by now already married and holding down nine-to-five jobs. Of course I dressed in blue button-down oxford shirts and wore my hair clipped short, but what else was I to wear, a serape? long curls? This was 1958. Besides, there were other ways in which it seemed to me I was distinguishable from the mass of my contemporaries: I read books and I wanted to write them. My master was not Mammon or Fun or Propriety, but Art, and Art of the earnest moral variety. I was by then already well into writing a novel about a retired Jewish haberdasher from the Bronx who on a trip to Europe with his wife nearly strangles to death a rude German housewife in his rage over “the six million.” The haberdasher was modeled upon my own kindly, excitable, hard-working Jewish father who had had a similar urge on a trip he and my mother had taken to visit me in the army; the haberdasher’s GI son was modeled upon myself, and his experiences closely paralleled mine in Germany during my fourteen months as a corporal in Frankfurt. I had had a German girl friend, a student nurse, large and blonde as a Valkyrie, but sweet to the core, and all the confusion that she had aroused in my parents, and in me, was to be at the heart of the novel that eventually became
A Jewish Father.
Over my desk I did not have a photograph of a sailboat or a dream house or a diapered child or a travel poster from a distant land, but words from Flaubert, advice to a young writer that I had copied out of one of his letters: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I appreciated the wisdom in this, and coming from Flaubert, the wit, but at twenty-five, for all my dedication to the art of fiction, for all the discipline and seriousness (and
awe)
with which I approached the Flaubertian vocation, I still wanted my life to be
somewhat
original, and if not violent, at least interesting, when the day’s work was done. After all, hadn’t Flaubert himself, befo
re he settled down at his round
table to become the tormented anchorite of modern literature, gone off as a gentleman-vagabond to the Nile, to climb the pyramids and sow his oats with dusky dancing girls?
So: Maureen Johnson, though not exactly Egyptian, struck me as someone who might add a little outside interest to my dedicated writer’s life. Did she! Eventually she
displaced
the writing, she was so interesting. To begin with, she was twenty-nine years of age, that temptingly unknown creature of a young man’s eroto-heroic imaginings,
an older woman.
Moreover, she had the hash marks to prove it. Not one but two divorces: first from the husband in Rochester, a
Yugoslav saloonkeeper named Mezik, whose sixteen-year-old barmaid she
had
been; she
claimed that Mezik, a heavy drinker with a strong right hook, had once “forced” her to go down on a friend of his, the manager of an upholstery factory—later she changed the story somewhat and said that the three of them had been drunk at the time, and that the men had drawn straws to see which of them young Maureen would go off with to the bedroom; she had decided to blow Mezik’s buddy, rather than have intercourse with him, because it had seemed to her, in the circumstances and in her innocence, less demeaning. “It wasn’t,” she added. Then the marriage and divorce from Walker, a handsome young actor with a resonant voice and a marvelous profile who turned out to be a homosexual—that is to say, he’d “promised” Maureen he’d get over it after the wedding, but only got worse. Twice then she had been “betrayed” by men—nonetheless there was plenty of the scrapper in her when we met. And plenty of tough wit. “I am Duchess of Malfi still,” was a line she pulled on me our first night in bed—not bad, I thought, not bad, even if it was obviously something her actor husband had taught her. She had the kind of crisp good looks that are associated with “dark Irishmen”—only a little marred in her case by a lantern jaw—a lithe, wiry little body (the body of a tomboyish prepubescent, except for the sizable conical breasts) and terrific energy and spirit. With her quick movements a
nd alert eyes, she was like one
of nature’s undersized indefatigables, the bee or the hummingbird, who are out working the flowers from sunup to sundown, sipping from a million stamens in order to meet their minimum daily nutritional requirements. She jocularly boasted of having been the fastest runner, male or female, of her era in the Elmira, New York, grade-school system, and that (of all she told me) may well have been the truth. The night we met—at a poet’s party uptown—she had challenged me to a footrace from the Astor Place subway station to my apartment two blocks away on East Ninth: “Winner calls the shots!” she cried, and off we went —I triumphed, but only by the length of a brownstone, and at the apartment, breathless from the race she’d run me, I said, “Okay, the spoils: take off your clothes,” which she gladly (and rapidly) proceeded to do in the hallway where we stood, panting. Hot stuff, this (thought I); very
interesting.
Oh yes, she was fast, that girl—but I was faster, was I not?
…
Also, I should mention here, Maureen had these scores to settle with my sex, and rather large delusions about her gifts, which she had come to believe lay somewhere, anywhere, in the arts.
At the age of sixteen, an eleventh-grader, she had run away from her family’s home in Elmira—a runaway, that got me too. I’d never met a real one before. What did her father do? “Everything. Nothing. Handyman. Night watchman. Who remembers any more?” Her mother? “Kept house. Drank. Oh, Christ, Peter, I forgot them long ago. And they, me.” She ran off from Elmira to become—of course, an actress
…
but of all places, to Rochester. “What did I know?” she said, dismissing her innocence with a wave of the hand; a dead issue, that innocence. In Rochester she met Mezik (“married the brute—and then met his buddy”), and after three years of frustration with the second-raters in the local avant-garde theater group, switched to art school to become—an abstract painter. Following her divorce, she gave up painting—and the painter whose mistress she had become during her separation from Mezik and who had broken his “promise” to help get her
in with his dealer in Detroit—
and took harpsichord lessons while waiting on tables in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a town she’d heard had fewer types like Mezik in residence. There, just twenty-one, she married Walker of the Brattle Theater; five long years followed, of him and his Harvard boys. By the time we met, she had already tried wood sculpture in Greenwich Village (her teacher’s wife was fiercely jealous of her, so she dropped it) and was back “in the theater,” temporarily “in the production end”—
that
is, taking tickets and ushering at an off-Broadway theater on Christopher Street.