Authors: Philip Roth
“That is the way you see it. Look here, we are clearly at an impasse, and under these conditions treatment cannot be continued. We can make no progress.”
“But I did not just walk in off
the
street last week. I
am your patient.”
“True. And I cannot be under attack from my patient any longer.”
“Tolerate it,” I said bitterly—a phrase of his that had helped me through some rough days. “Look, given that you must certainly have had an
inkling
that I might be using that incident in a piece of fiction, since you in fact
knew
I was working on a story to which that incident was the conclusion, mightn’t you at the very least have thought to ask my permission, ask if it was all right with me
…
”
“Do you ask permission of the people you write about?”
“But I am not a psychoanalyst! The comparison won’t work. I write fiction—or did, once upon a time.
A Jewish Father
was not ‘about’ my family, or about Grete and me, as you certainly must realize. It may have originated there, but it was finally a contrivance, an artifice, a
rumination
on the real. A self-avowed
work of imagination, Doctor! I do not write ‘about’ people in a strict factual or historical sense.”
“But then you think,” he said, with a hard look, “that I don’t either.”
“Dr. Spielvogel, please,
that
is just not a good enough answer. And you must know it. First off, you are bound by ethical considerations that happen not to be the ones that apply to my profession. Nobody comes to me with confidences the way they do to you, and if they tell me stories, it’s not so that I can cure what ails them. That’s obvious enough. It’s in the nature of being a novelist to make private life public—that’s a part of what a novelist is up to. But certainly it is not what I thought
you
were up to when I came here. I thought your job was to treat me! And second, as to accuracy—you are
supposed
to be accurate, after all, even if you haven’t been as accurate as I would want you to be in this thing here.”
“Mr. Tarnopol, ‘this thing here’ is a scientific paper. None of us could write such papers, none of us could share our findings with one another, if we had to rely upon the permission or the approval of our patients in order to publish. You are not the only patient who would want to censor out the unpleasant facts or who would find ‘inaccurate’ what he doesn’t like to hear about himself.”
“Oh that won’t wash, and you know it! I’m willing to hear anything about myself—and always have been. My problem, as I see it, isn’t my impenetrability. As a matter of fact, I tend to rise to the bait, Dr. Spielvogel, as Maureen, for one, can testify.”
“Oh, do you? Ironically, it is the narcissistic defenses discussed here that prevent you from accepting the article as something other than an assault upon your dignity or an attempt to embarrass or be
little
you. It is precisely the blow to your narcissism that has swollen the issue out of all proportion for you. Simultaneously, you act as though it is about nothing
but
you, when actually, of the fifteen pages of text, your case takes up barely two. But then you do not l
ike at all the idea of yourself
suffering from ‘castration anxiety.’ You do not like the idea of your aggressive fantasies
vis-à-vis
your mother. You never have. You do not like me to describe your father, and by extension you, his son and heir, as ‘ineffectual’ and ‘submissive,’
alth
ough you don’t like when I call you ‘successful’ either. Apparently that tends to dilute a little too much your comforting sense of victimized innocence.”
“Look, I’m sure there are in New York City such people as you’ve just described. Only I ain’t one of ‘em! Either that’s some model you’ve got in your head, some kind of patient for all seasons, or else it’s some other patient of yours you’re thinking about; I don’t know what the hell to make of it, frankly. Maybe what it comes down to is a problem of self-expression; maybe it’s that the writing isn’t very precise.”
“Oh, the writing is also a problem?”
“I don’t like to say it, but maybe writing isn’t your strong point.”
He smiled. “Could it be, in your estimation? Could I be precise enough to please you? I think perhaps what so disturbs you about the incident in the Anne Frank story is not that by using it I may have disclosed your identity, but
that
in your opinion I plagiarized and abused your material. You are made so very angry by this piece of writing that I have dared to publish. But if I am such a weak and imprecise writer as you suggest, then you should not feel so threatened by my little foray into English prose.”
“I don’t feel ‘threatened.’ Oh, please, don’t argue like Maureen, will you? That is just more of that language again, which doesn’t at all express what you mean and doesn’t get anyone anywhere.”
“I assure you, unlike Maureen, I said ‘threatened’ because I meant ‘threatened.’”
“But maybe writing
isn’t
your strong point. Maybe that is an objective statement of fact and has nothing to do with whether I am a writer or a tightrope walker.”
“But why should it matter so much to you?”
‘Why? Why?” That he could seriously ask this question just took the heart out of me; I felt the tears welling up. “Because, among other things, I am the subject of that writing! I am the one your imprecise language has misrepresented! Because I come here each day and turn over the day’s receipts, every last item out of my most personal life, and in return I expect an accurate accounting!” I had begun to cry. “You were my friend, and I told you the truth. I told you everything.”
“Look, let me disabuse you of the idea that the whole world is waiting with bated breath for the newest issue of our
little
journal in which you claim you are misrepresented. I assure you that is not the case. It is not the
New Yorker
magazine, or even the
Kenyon Review.
If it is any comfort to you, most of my colleagues don’t even bother to read it. But this is your narcissism again. Your sense that the whole world has nothing to look forward to but the latest information about the secret life of Peter Tarnopol.”
The tears had stopped. “And that is your reductivism again, if I may say so, and your obfuscation. Spare me that word ‘narcissism,’ will you? You use it on me like a club.”
“The word is purely descriptive and carries no valuation,” said the doctor.
“Oh, is that so? Well, you be on the receiving end and see how
little
‘valuation’ it carries! Look, can’t we grant that there is a difference between self-esteem and vanity, between pride and megalomania? Can we grant that there actually is an ethical matter at stake here, and that my sensitivity to it, and your apparent indifference to it, cannot be explained away as a psychological aberration of
mine?
You’ve got a psychology too, you know. You do this
with me all the time, Dr. Spiel
vogel. First you shrink the area of moral concern, you say that what I, for instance, call my responsibility toward Susan is so much camouflaged narcissism—and then if I consent to see it that way, and I leave off with the mo
ral implications of my conduct,
you tell me I’m a narcissist who thinks only about his own welfare. Maureen, you know, used to do some
thing
similar—only she worked the hog-tying game from the other way round. She made the kitchen
sink
into a moral issue! Everything in the whole wide world was a test of my decency and honor—and the moral ignoramus you’re looking at believed her! If driving out of Rome for Frascati, I took a wrong turn, she had me pegged within half a mile as a felon, as a fiend up from Hell by way of Westchester and the Ivy League. And I believed her!
…
Look, look—let’s
talk
about Maureen a minute, let’s talk about the possible consequences of all this for me, ‘narcissistic’ as that must seem to you. Suppose Maureen were to get hold of this issue and read what you’ve written here. It’s not unlike her, after all, to be on her toes where I’m concerned—where
alimony
is concerned. I mean it won’t do, to go back a moment to what you just said—it won’t do to say that nobody reads the magazine anyway. Because if you really believed that, then you wouldn’t publish your paper there to begin with. What good are your findings published in a magazine that has no readers? The magazine is around, and it’s read by somebody, surely here in New York it is—and if it somehow came to Maureen’s attention
…
well, just imagine how happy she would be to read those pages about me to the judge in the courtroom. Just imagine a New York municipal judge taking that stuff in. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Oh, I see very well what you’re saying.”
“Where you write, for instance, that I was ‘acting out’ sexually with other women ‘almost from the beginning of the marriage.’ First off, that is not accurate either. Stated like that, you make it seem as though I’m just another Italian-American who sneaks off after work each day for a quick bang on the way home from the poetry office. Do you follow me? You make me sound like somebody who is simply fucking around with women all the time. And that is not so. God knows what you write here is not a proper description of my affair with Karen. That was
noth
ing if it wasn’t earnest—and earnest in part because I was so
new
at it!”
“And the prostitutes?”
“Two prostitutes—in three years. That breaks down to about half a prostitute a year, which is probably, among miserably married men, a national record for
not
acting out. Have you forgotten? I
was miserable
!
See the thing in context, will you? You seem to forget that the wife I was married to was Maureen. You seem to forget the circumstances under which we married. You seem to forget that we had an argument in every piazza, cathedral, museum, trattoria, pensione, and hotel on the Italian peninsula. Another man would have beaten her head in! My predecessor Mezik, the Yugoslav barkeep, would have ‘acted out’ with a right to the jaw. I am a literary person. I went forth and did the civilized thing—I laid a three-thousand-lire whore! Ah, and that’s how you came up with ‘Italian-American’ for me, isn t it?
He waved a hand to show what he thought of my
aper
ç
u—
then said, “Another man might have confronted his wife more directly, that is true, rather than libidinizing his anger.”
“But the only direct way to confront that woman was
to kill her!
And you yourself have told me that killing people is against the law, crazy wives included. I was not ‘sexually acting out,’ whatever that means—I was trying to stay alive in all that madness. Stay
me
!
‘Let me shun that,’ and so on!”
“And,” he was saying, “you convenien
tly
forget once again the wife of your young English department colleague in Wisconsin.”
“Good Christ, who are you, Cotton Mather? Look, I may be childish and a weakling, I may even be the narcissist of your fondest professional dreams—
but 1 am not a slob
!
I am not a bum or a lecher or a gigolo or some kind of walking penis. Why do you want to portray me that way? Why do you want to characterize me in your writing as some sort of
heartless
rapist
manqué
? Surely, surely there is another way to describe my affair with Karen
—“
“But I said nothing about Karen. I only reminded you of
the
wife of your colleague, whom you ran into that afternoon at the shopping center in Madison.”
“You’ve got such a good memory, why don’t you also remember that I didn’t even fuc
k
her! She blew me, in the car. So what?
So what?
I tell you, it was a surprise to the two of us. And what’s it to you, anyway? I mean that! We were friends. She wasn’t so happily married either. That, for Christ’s sake, wasn’t ‘sexually acting out.’ It was friendship! It was heartbrokenness! It was generosity! It was tenderness! It was despair! It was being adolescents together for ten secret minutes in the rear of a car before we both went nobly back into Adulthood! It was a sweet and harmless game of Let’s Pretend! Smile, if you like, smile from your pulpit, but that’s still closer to a proper description of what was going on there than what
you
call it. And we did not let it go any further, which was a possibility, you know; we let it remain a kind of happy, inconsequential accident and returned like good soldiers to
the
fucking front lines. Really, Your Holiness, really, Your Excellency, does that in your mind add up to ‘acting out sexually with other women from the beginning of the marriage’?”