Looking for a Girl

by Richard Todd

MY LIFE AS A MAN by Philip Roth Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $8.95

There was a time not long ago when the word “bitch” was a common usage in the United States. I may be wrong, but it seems now to be one of those words that is slipping into quaintness before one’s eyes. It organized a lot of experience, “bitch.” It described what was felt to be an archetypical form of American womanhood. Recall that a decade ago a general theory of American society, subscribed to at several levels of sophistication, held that one thing wrong with our country was its gutless men and its oppressive women. “Momism” was worried over. Our boys were growing up deprived of a traditional sense of male dominance, outlets for masculine aggressiveness were disappearing, women, particularly devious, embittered, bitchy women, were having all too much to say about the tone and substance of our life. During the sixties these ideas began to undergo, let us say, some complication. As late as 1968, though, a book by one of our best novelists could be billed in its paperback edition with the line, “A stunning portrait of the all-American bitch.”

The book was Philip Roth’s third novel. When She Was Good, an account of the life of Lucy Nelson, a girl of the Middle West. It was earnest, unrelievedly grim, grittily realistic to the point of seeming almost an anachronism—Dreiser was invoked by way of comparison. The cover line was, of course, not wholly accurate, but by the end of the book Lucy had become a monstrosity, half-crazed, venomous. And her history suggested a heightened version of the popular conception of what could go wrong in the course of a woman’s life. She was the victim of three generations of weak men: a grandfather who indulged her mother, a shiftless father, and a sentimental, ineffectual husband of vague ambition and little talent.

When She Was Good was in some ways an anomaly among Roth’s novels—remote from his natural sources of fiction, from Jewishness and urban and academic experience. But then again, his work has been noted for its variousness. Roth’s career has been a dazzling skate across the ice always in advance of the crack. If you can say, as I think you can, that his best novels have been flawed in ways that went largely unrecognized amidst the praise that greeted them, it is also true that he has not settled into the self-parodic habits that afflict so many writers. He has continually shifted mood, setting, persona.

With Goodbye, Columbus, he arrived as few novelists do: he walked into the room and all heads turned. He seemed to have, as Irving Howe wrote at the time, “what many writers spend a lifetime searching for—a unique voice, a secure rhythm, a distinctive subject.” In retrospect. voice and rhythm seem to have been borrowed too directly from Nick Carraway. and Roth promptly abandoned them, as well as his subject, the newly suburbanized well-to-do Jews of New Jersey. Just three years later, in Letting Go, he emerged as a much more mature writer, with abundant energy and an appetite for intensely realistic social detail, though the book was sprawling and unruly. The longest silence in Roth’s career occurred before the publication of When She Was Good. Then, not long after this disciplined but relentlessly deterministic novel, some short fiction—notably a story called “Whacking Off”— signaled yet another Roth, the outlandish sexual comedian of Portnoy’s Complaint. Everything since (Our Gang, The Breast, The Great American Novel) has been in the nature of a game, and a disappointment. Now there is an eighth Roth book. My Life as a Man is the only one of his novels that might be called retrospective. It returns to a theme that has been visible in much of his work—a fascination with varieties of bitchery, of which Lucy Nelson is only an instance.

My Life as a Man has a curious structure, more complex, more selfconsciously literary than anything else Roth has written. It occurs in three sections. The first two are short stories, which end abortively, recounting episodes in the adolescence and young adulthood of Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman is a Portnoy figure: son of a ferociously doting Jewish mother and father, intellectually gifted and obsessed with forbidden sex—an obsession that delivers him to women who in most ways disgust him. In the first story, “Salad Days,” Zuckerman lusts successfully after Sharon, the redheaded “Amazon” daughter of A1 (“The Zipper King”) Shatsky. She is distressingly dumb, socially unsuitable, fails to pronounce the “g” in “length,” but she is responsive to Zuekerman’s wants. She masturbates with a zucchini, at his request: “The sight of that long green gourd (uncooked, of course) entering into and emerging from her body, the sight of the Zipper King’s daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her legs flung apart, wantonly surrendering . . . herself to a vegetable, was as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever seen in his (admittedly) secular life.”

Well, this story has its moments, but it doesn’t exactly break new ground. Portnoy did it all —if squashes weren’t involved, the spirit was the same—and with more energy. As if he felt similar misgivings about his mode of telling Zuckerman’s story, Roth abandons “Salad Days” and introduces “a new author,” the first-person voice of an older Zuckerman. The second story, “Courting Disaster.” relates the obsessive-compulsive and pervasively melancholy events of his twenties. Zuckerman tidily advances his career as an English professor, but destroys his life in an irrational marriage to an older, plain-faced, frigid woman named Lydia Ketterer. He finds her physically repulsive but morally attractive—largely because she has survived a harrowing sexual past that began at age twelve with her father’s raping, then tearfully deserting, her. Zuckerman’s first encounter with her is filled with loathing: “. . . the vaginal lips appeared withered and discolored in a way that was alarming to me.” Lydia survived her past but doesn’t survive her marriage to Zuckerman: she ends her life with a can opener. In the meantime, Zuckerman has driven himself into an ecstasy of furtive longing for the daughter she brought to their marriage from an earlier one. After the suicide, he consummates his love for the sixteen-year-old girl and flees with her to Italy, where he lives in exile and self-contempt.

As perhaps I should have explained sooner, these two stories are offered to us not as the work of Philip Roth but as the products of a fictive figure called Peter Tarnopol. The last and the best section of the book is called “My True Story,” and is Tarnopol’s “autobiographical” account of a life that is scarcely less ghastly, though more interesting, than the life of his character Zuckerman. Roth’s gift for antic despair is on display again in this story, which has moments that are as amusing as the brightest spots in Portnoy, and more resonant. Tarnopol’s life and work are sacrificed to his marriage to Maureen, a majestically deranged woman. They wed on the occasion of Maureen’s lying that she is pregnant. To pass her rabbit test she buys a sample of urine on the street from a genuinely pregnant woman. (Later she decides to have a fake abortion.) She is a fury of paranoia and jealousy, who is ready to send a car plunging off the cliffside because of an imagined insult. Separated from Maureen, who refuses him divorce, Tarnopol spends most of his income on support payments, and on his psychiatrist (gentle Spielvogel, who returns as a treat for students of the oeuvre, from Portnoy’s Complaint). In the manner of a Roth hero, Tarnopol finds another woman—a Waspy, beautiful heiress named Susan who asks only that he dine on her exquisite cooking and drink from her ample wine cellar. She is also—what else?—frigid and suicidal. But it is Maureen who obsesses Tarnopol. His Zuckerman stories, he explains, are attempts to purge his imagination of her, and their weaknesses are the weaknesses of a driven man. Various other characters comment on the Zuckerman stories, including Spielvogel, who is doing an analytical study of Tarnopol as an example of the artist as narcissist for a professional journal.

Round and round we go, until the complexity threatens to reach Borgesian proportions. Tales within a tale. Levels. The reader may be forgiven, though—that is, I forgive myself—for thinking that the three parts of My Life as a Man were not conceived as an organic statement. More likely they were bum starts on novels by “Philip Roth.” Parts of the book have been published, in fact, without the “Peter Tarnopol” device; one section even appeared as an essay in the New York Times. The structure of the book, on the other hand, is something more than a convenient way of packaging Roth’s scraps.

The effect of saying that the various parts of the novel are “drawn from the writings of Peter Tarnopol” is, obviously, to establish more distance between author and work than is conventionally afforded by the creation of a first-person narrator. It is rather like an artist’s signing his name to an object of his choice and calling it art; except in this case the artist signs someone else’s name and calls it irony. If there is something facile about this, it is nevertheless not without meaning. It expresses a certain discomfort on Roth’s part with what he is doing. One way of reading this book, in fact, might be to take it as a lively but inwardly grieving meditation on his limitations as a novelist.

My Life as a Man—at least in its final section—contains, as one has come to expect, some appealing things, in particular two comic scenes of inspired, depraved slapstick. (The occasion for each is a pitched battle between Tarnopol and Maureen. In the first, Tarnopol in the height of his impotent rage can think of nothing to do but put on his wife’s clothes. In the second he thinks to strike her and she writhes on the floor: “ ‘Die me,’ she babbled deliriously—‘die me good, die me long—’ ”)

But for all its high jinks, a certain weariness infects this book. For one thing, Roth for the first time in his career is repeating himself, particularly in the Zuckerman stories. And there is a generalized sense that old jokes are being told. The nice symmetry between Jew and Goy culture—the use of Jewishness as a source of fun but an emblem of values, Waspness as a symbol of desirable debasement—this dynamic begins to seem programmatic and tired. But the crucial issue has to do with women and sex. At one moment, Tarnopol laments:

. . 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. ... In her own extreme and vivid way, each of these antipathetic originals demonstrated 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.

The daylight that Roth places between himself and Tarnopol protects him from responsibility for the full weight of this world view, but it is true nevertheless that the statement defines a pattern in Roth’s work: weak male, dominating female. And that pattern is of course every bit as “conventional” as its opposite. It is good for laughs, but the elaborate structure of this book suggests that Roth has something more in mind, as one might guess he would. Has any writer—even Mailer?—devoted more energy than Roth has to the delineation of current sexual mores? Given the breadth of this enterprise, it must be discouraging for him, in the end, to come up with infinite variations on a formula of vaudevillean simplicity.

Peter Tarnopol remarks that his donning his wife’s clothes is admission of defeat. But one might take it as a comic gesture of literary longing—what Roth has never done, and what he must yearn to do, is to create on the page a credible, whole, complex, desirable woman. Consider the museum of grotesques that he has given us instead. The red-headed Amazon of this novel, and the Monkey of Portnoy’s Complaint, who contorts her body exquisitely for the delight of Alexander Portnoy, but who can’t spell “dear.” Grim Libby of Letting Go, and Lydia Ketterer with her withered genitalia. Mad Maureen, frigid Susan, and man-hating Lucy Nelson.

And then one thinks of Brenda. Remember Brenda, of Goodbye, Columbus? Actually, I discover that I don’t remember her so well. She was distinguished for her pal-like. sportif attitude toward sex, as in the fetching scene when she leaves her doctor, having been fitted for a diaphragm, and says, “I’m wearing it.”Several characters are in fact more vividly rendered than Brenda, and the book lives in the socially acute eye of its narrator, Neil Klugman.

In a delicate way, Goodbye, Columbus prefigures Roth’s attitude toward the women in his fiction. In the first sentence we see a hero gently entrapped: “The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.” In the final paragraph, the affair over, we hear him musing. “What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing—who knows—into winning?” He was free. But he had been as close as a Roth hero was to come to loving, and Brenda was as close as Roth would come to fully realizing a woman. She was his first, best girl.

What has followed, of course, has been stunningly entertaining and inventive. But there is a difference between inventiveness and imagination, and the difference describes what has gone wrong with Roth’s fiction. Can anyone doubt that for all his success he would trade chapters and bank accounts for a single page of imaginative excursion into the mind and senses of a woman worth knowing?

That he has not done so hardly distinguishes Roth from most other American novelists. The absence of fully dimensional women is, as everybody knows, a classical feature of that American fiction that has been written by men: Leslie Fiedler has explained it all. But the absence is felt with peculiar keenness at the moment, with the voices of contemporary feminism in our ears. However you hear those voices, it is impossible not to respond to the essential accusation they contain, as chilling as a hiss across a marital pillow: you don’t understand the first thing about me. One way of seeing Philip Roth’s career is as a fragment of cultural evidence that the accusation is just.