CHAPTER
Six
ROTH’S FAVORITE PROFESSOR AT BUCKNELL WAS MILDRED Martin, a wry, middle-aged Midwesterner who earned his respect with a gravitas that was often mistaken for severity. “She scared nine-tenths of the student body,” said her student Jesse Bier, “mostly by false reputation, but she was essentially the kindest of human beings, however skeptical her mind.” A lifelong spinster who “rather shrank from physical contact” (Bier), Martin lived in an eighteenth-century clapboard house on South Front Street with a faculty couple, Harold and Gladys Cook, and together they drank nightly martinis for most of their adult lives. Possessed of “solid learning” she was keen to impart, albeit with no desire to seem impressive about it, Martin provided a crucial service for Roth: “She valued me. This is what I needed and what I got. . . . Look, somebody has to tell you that you’re smart and that you’re doing the right thing.” His friendship with Miss Martin would continue to evolve until her death more than forty years later.
The highlight of Roth’s undergraduate career was “The Seminar”—Martin’s two-semester, invitation-only honors course that covered the entirety of English literature “from its beginnings to the present,” or from Beowulf to Stephen Spender, as things stood then. For nine credit hours per semester (the equivalent of three regular courses) the workload was immense: Students had to read one or two books a week, as well as fifty pages in Albert Baugh’s Literary History of England, an underlined copy of which Roth would forever keep on the library table of his Connecticut living room. Because of Baugh, he liked to say, “I still know who Barnaby Goodge is and what Tottle’s Miscellany is and am the only person on West Seventy-ninth who has read Ralph Roister Doister.” Some of his other reading included Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, a lot of Shakespeare (four plays, the sonnets, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”), Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, the major Romantics, at least one novel from Trollope’s Barchester series, Thomas Huxley, selected passages from Ulysses, and more. Students wrote a lot, too: at least one weekly critical paper and a summary of the assigned Baugh pages, all of it “scrutinized for accuracy and for common sense by Miss Martin.”
The class of eight students met for three hours every Thursday afternoon, either in the Vaughan Literature Building library, or in Miss Martin’s living room on South Front Street. Sitting beside the fireplace in the latter, Roth would admire the old rugs and floorboards, the vast shelves of books, and look forward to his own “life of reading books and writing about them”—and, of course, talking about them. Discussions often got heated, as students sought to impress Miss Martin with their superperceptive sniping at “unsubstantiated” opinions, or criticism that was merely “subjective.” As Roth recalled, “She herself had no more animus than a radar screen locating objects in space: what Mildred Martin located were our weaknesses of observation and expression. Nothing imperfect flew by her unnoted. She was the first of my scrupulous editors—the sternest, the most relentless, the best.” In 1991, during a videotaped chat with Roth, Martin still remembered the excitement of that particular seminar class—her best ever, she thought, along with the 1948–49 group that included Wheatcroft—and laughed about the time Roth and Minton had become so exercised over a line in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” that they stood shouting at each other while “Tasch was egging you on.”
ROTH: I remember! Dick was wrong and I was right. . . .
MARTIN: . . . I never had people so excited about the meaning of a line. Do your students ever get that excited in New York?
Martin also remembered the “four frightened girls” in class, daunted by the brilliance of Roth, Minton, and a TA named John Tilton (“smart in an academic way,” Roth said of the last, “but no flair”). On December 2, 1953, Martin wrote a reminder in her diary that Roth had agreed to teach her world lit class in her absence (“I did,” said Roth, “and loved it”), and on December 15, she reflected, “When I was 21, in comparison with Roth and Minton, I was a child.” In the same entry she noted that Susie Kiess had stopped coming to class, and “Mrs. Bender” had dropped, too, after bursting into tears while Roth read his paper on “The Fight at Finnsburg”; fleeing to the kitchen, Mrs. Bender returned at last to say “I know the answer to that question,” gave it, and disappeared forever. Martin did not seem disconcerted, and indeed looked forward to the remaining two girls’ departures after every Thursday class, while the boys went on bickering and the five of them would “[begin] to have a really good time.”
Along with his cherished Baugh, another old college book Roth would retain to the end was an anthology of essays, Toward Liberal Education, wherein he’d discovered the satire of Philip Wylie, the now all-but-forgotten author of Opus 21, Generation of Vipers, and Finnley Wren. To the young Roth, Wylie’s mandarin railing against “Momism,” advertising, and popular culture in toto was a bracing revelation. Later Roth would revisit his idol and find his work “pompous, mannered, superior, arrogant . . . everything I must have loved then”; indeed, at the time, Wylie was a crucial step toward framing certain grievances against the crasser bumpkins on campus and his own upbringing.*
The quintessence of local vulgarity was still The Bucknellian, especially as it existed in 1953, under the editorial hand of Barbara (Bobby) Roemer, a popular girl on campus who also served as vice president of Tri Delt and captain of the cheerleading squad. It occurred to Roth, in retrospect, that his infamous attacks on her newspaper were a little aroused by jealousy—students actually read the thing in droves, which could hardly be said of Et Cetera—but then, too, it was just a ghastly rag: “If you’re a satirist you’re being thrown a slow curve with The Bucknellian,” he said, “and you just time yourself and just smack it out of the fucking ballpark.”
“There is a theory that if a thousand monkeys were chained to a thousand typewriters for an unspecified number of years,” Roth’s editorial for the Spring 1953 issue began,† “they would have written all of the great literature that has been set down in the world by human beings. If such is the case, what is holding up production of The Bucknellian? We do not expect Miss Roemer and her cohorts to turn out great literature, for, after all, they are not monkeys, but we do expect them to publish a newspaper.” Thus Roth explained his motive for including, as that issue’s centerfold, a satirical facsimile of The Bucknellian that mimicked, among other things, Miss Roemer’s own well-known editorial voice: “Gee whiz, why can’t we have some school spirit here at ivy-covered B. U.! Huh, why not? Boy, at other schools they yell their heads off at athletic contests; they go hog wild, at other schools!” Another typical item in Roth’s Bucknellian came with the headline TRI DELTI [sic] AND PIPHI TIE FOR FIRST IN ANNUAL CAKE BAKE; PHI MU TAKES THIRD SPOT WITH MARBLE CAKE and went on soberly to record that the Phi Mu’s entry had been relegated to third place because of a lack of “fluffiness” and “texture” in their product. CHEERS TO CONTINUE read another headline—and so on.
The parody was a hit among the campus smart set, and one of the letters published in the subsequent (May) issue of Et Cetera was jointly signed by Mildred Martin, Bob Maurer, Jack Wheatcroft, and one Ruth Lavare: “We wish to commend you and your staff for having absorbed one of the lessons for which students come to college—that criticism intelligently used is one of the best instruments for directing inevitable change.” Another of Roth’s admirers, C. Willard Smith, wrote to congratulate him on the “good humor” and “satirical wit” of the facsimile per se, allowing that it made its point “if the shoe fits.” Willard continued, “But in the editorial, you virtually presented Miss Roemer a pair of I. Miller super specials of exact size. . . . I might even add that your editorial seemed to me almost unchivalrous.” Willard was far from alone in thinking so. Bobby Roemer was reduced to tears and (some say) scarred for life, and her managing editor, Red Macauley, came knocking on Roth’s door and seemed ready to deck the “little Jewish Swift,” as Roth called his younger self—“Swiftberg.”
And Swiftberg wasn’t done. A year later Roth introduced his second Bucknellian parody with an editorial titled “A Physician’s Apologia,” from this epigraph by Dryden (no less): “he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender, than the physician to the patient, when he prescribes harsh remedies to an inveterate disease.” Reminding the reader that he’d previously addressed the condition of Bucknell’s “diseased newspaper,” Roth reported that his mockery had struck some as “cruel and callous, and others (more perceptive) as immoral and/or immature; a few were struck by the unfortunate truth of the remarks. If The Bucknellian was struck at all, I fear its granite skin was not pierced.” Once more unto the breach, then, with another satire composed mostly of banal spoofing of Roemer’s fondness for frat gossip and school spirit. One item, however—based on an actual weekly feature in the newspaper—made the campus community take startled notice. “Girl of the Weak [sic]” was illustrated by Matisse’s Odalisque Seated with Arms Raised, a nude with hairy armpits, and purported to be about Honor Goodgirl: “Since Honor is an Education Major, she is on the Dean’s List. She is from her local state, and is also a sea-shell collector of sorts, an amateur horticulturist, and a virgin. When asked to comment upon this wide variety of interests, she said, ‘I really am a virgin.’ ”
The dean of men in 1954 was a former Bucknell football star named Mal Musser; lanky, bald, and affable, the man was a foremost proponent of what the college liked to call its Hello Spirit—a spirit Musser thought Swiftberg had roundly abused. Answering Musser’s summons, Roth found the man grimly surveying his portrait of Honor Goodgirl. “Young man,” said Musser, once Roth had seated himself, “this is not in the Bucknell spirit. The Bucknellian is a fine”—etc. Roth was also censured by the Board of Publications, and while no one demanded that Et Cetera shutter its offices, Roth (like Marcus Messner in Indignation) was all but certain he’d “fucked [him]self.” Soon he’d be expelled and drafted, if not sent to Korea; at the very least he’d lost his chance at a decent graduate school scholarship. Nor did it help (he suspected) that his name was Roth, that his associates were Tasch, Minton, and a Sammy business manager named Pincus—“a little nest of Jews,” as he later put it.
All but broken for the time being, he was “nearly in tears” when he appeared on Miss Martin’s doorstep. “ ‘Well,’ ” she remembered saying, “ ‘if you’re going to be a satirist you’re going to be misunderstood all your life.’ And he kind of gazed at me and said, ‘Is that true?’ ” In Roth’s case it was eminently true, and he would come to view Honor Goodgirl as an emblem of his future greatness—“the work of an incipient Mickey Sabbath” who’d left his “quivering sensitivity” behind. For Bobby Roemer, the parodies were perhaps the first dark clouds swarming along her horizon. Some fifteen years later she came to the office of Dr. Martin Castelbaum and noticed his Bucknell diploma while he took her history. She asked him when he’d graduated, and he told her. “Don’t you know me?” she inquired, a little frantically. Dr. Castelbaum—who’d rarely stepped outside the library in college, and whose romance with the shiksa was, truth be known, as chaste as it was short-lived—confessed that he didn’t. The woman burst into tears: “Those were the happiest days of my life! I was editor of The Bucknellian, I was a cheerleader, I was everything at Bucknell!” And she rushed out of his office, never to return.‡
“How richly it fulfills the promise of Honor Goodgirl!” Charlotte Maurer congratulated Roth in 1971, on the publication of Our Gang, a tasteless satire of the Nixon administration. “I imagine that only Bob and I, and possibly Mildred Martin, remember how long you’ve been a master satirist,” she said, naming the novel’s co-dedicatees.
THOUGH MORE STUDIOUS than ever, Roth would court disaster in a way that his father, for one, might have foreseen. Seniors were allowed to live off campus, and that year Roth and Tasch took rooms at a boardinghouse belonging to a pious white-haired widow, Mrs. Purnell, who informed them forthwith that women (that is, one’s fiancée) were allowed to visit only on Sunday, for tea, and only then if the door was left open. One Sunday evening, a few weeks into his final semester, Roth was lying in bed with Betty Powell when he heard his landlady return from what he thought would be a longer family visit in nearby Mifflinburg; waving Betty under the bed, Roth hastily got dressed, grabbed a book, and smiled at the bleak-faced widow on his way out. He planned to go around and open a window for Betty, but the old lady was in his room like a shot, prodding the girl with her foot: “Get out of there, you hussy!” Roth spotted Betty fleeing the house, and walked her back to her room before returning to confront Mrs. Purnell. He found the woman dialing (presumably) the dean of men. “You had no right to scare that girl that way!” Roth blustered, foreseeing his “life in a shambles,” especially given his relations with Musser.
He found refuge at the Maurers, asking to speak alone with Bob. “Have you paid your rent?” Bob asked the haggard Roth, who replied he’d only paid half. Bob assured him that the mean old widow wouldn’t dare risk forfeiting half her rent money, now that it was too late in the semester to find another lodger, and meanwhile laughter exploded from the kitchen where Charlotte had been listening. Roth slept at his friends’ house for a couple of nights while awaiting a last, fatal summons from Dean Musser. When nothing happened, he returned to his room chez Purnell, and sure enough his landlady never mentioned the incident again, nor did Roth invite Betty to visit, even for tea.
Within weeks another disaster loomed: Betty’s period was late. Both she and Roth had applied for prestigious graduate school scholarships, but if Betty was pregnant they’d have little choice but to marry and stay in Lewisburg—living amid the quonset huts of Bucknell Village, supporting themselves as TAs while earning their homely Bucknell master’s degrees. For a couple of weeks Roth waited for Betty each night outside the student commons, and each night she’d greet him with a fraught little shake of her head; one night, however, she arrived beaming. Roth was likely the more ecstatic of the two: “Having narrowly escaped premature domesticity and its encumbering responsibilities,” he wrote in The Facts, “I abandoned myself to dreams of erotic adventures that I couldn’t hope to encounter other than on my own.”
On April 15, 1954, Dean Musser informed Roth (“Hearty congratulations”) that he was one of a handful of seniors elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a week later Miss Martin noted in her diary that Roth had come around to discuss the speech he’d been chosen to give at the induction ceremony. He was also one of eight magna cum laude graduates (plus a single summa), having received mostly As and the odd B in ROTC and C in PE. As for Betty Powell, she was the recipient (cum laude) of the Wainwright D. Blake Award for Outstanding Senior in Psychology.
Back in New Jersey that June, Roth faced a dilemma: after three months on a waiting list, he’d finally been offered a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where a brilliant older cousin, Sandy Kuvin (then pursuing his medical studies at Cambridge in England), had attended both college and graduate school; Kuvin had nothing but good things to say about the place. Meanwhile the University of Chicago had immediately offered Roth a scholarship, but a few alumni had “given [him] reports not entirely satisfactory,” as Roth wrote to Miss Martin in the “Lord Chesterfield” diction (as he later put it) that he adopted in his early letters to that formidable woman. One factor tipping him toward Chicago was his admiration for the university’s former (until 1951) president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, whose classic essay opposing college football, “Gate Receipts and Glory,” had also appeared in Roth’s beloved anthology, Toward Liberal Education. In an early draft of Zuckerman Unbound, a young Nathan imagines himself quoting the essay in a speech, amid the kind of fastidious little cues Roth himself was apt to scribble into the scripts of his every public utterance:
“The substitute for athleticism,” as Robert M. Hutchins had written in “Gate Receipts and Glory,” “is light and learning. (Pause for alliteration to sink in) The colleges and universities which (Sarcastically) taught the country football, can teach the country that the effort to discover truth (Significant pause), to transmit the wisdom of the race (Significant pause), and to preserve civilization (Significant pause) is exciting and (Bitter irony) perhaps important too.”
What would prove the decisive consideration, however, was that Betty Powell had accepted a scholarship to Penn. That summer the couple met for lunch at the Biltmore, and Roth calmly announced he was going to Chicago, in light of which he didn’t see the point of continuing their affair. “I didn’t do it with relish,” he remembered. “I did it with dispatch. I had no finesse. . . . That was the first blow I ever dealt a woman.” Saying goodbye at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Roth watched his old girlfriend leave on an escalator, where she began to sob; with some little surprise he realized she must have loved him after all.
She was, in fact, already replaced or soon to be. On June 28, Roth began work as a counselor at a YMHA day camp, Forest Lodge, a fifteen-mile bus trip from Newark. “I took my twelve ten year olds into the forest for a hike,” he wrote Miss Martin at the end of that first day; “moccasined Arctic trapper that I am, I proceeded to lose myself and the group; it took us two hours to find our way out; we walked about eight miles; for a moment—I must admit—when it looked as though they were going to have to send a helicopter out to find us, a tiny stab of panic rose in my gallant breast.” Nowhere in this account was any mention of a fellow counselor named Maxine Groffsky—a stunning eighteen-year-old who caught Roth’s eye while diving gracefully into the pool. A willowy girl with hair “the color of an Irish setter,” Groffsky had a kind of blasé athleticism that Roth evoked in his letters by calling her Jordan Baker, the jaunty golfing socialite in Gatsby. The model for Brenda Patimkin in Goodbye, Columbus, Groffsky was from suburban Maplewood rather than Short Hills (in the novella), though both places were on either side of South Mountain Reservation—an uphill trip from Newark “that brought one closer to heaven,” as Neil Klugman would have it, what with the sweeter breezes and grander houses at that elevation.
The couple began seeing each other day and night; on weekends they played tennis in South Orange, and Roth was a regular guest at the Groffsky dinner table. Roth would tweak a few facts, but otherwise the family mirrored the Patimkins at every salient point: Maxine’s older brother, Paul, was a basketball star at the University of Michigan, and their younger sister, Irene, was an assertive kid who attended kosher summer camp and later moved to Israel. What the children had in common was the doting solicitude of their father, Herman, a roughhewn Polish immigrant who’d made a killing as a wholesale glass distributor.§ Maxine’s attractive mother, Belle, was old friends with Uncle Bernie’s first wife, Byrdine, whose daughter Margery had been friends with Maxine at Columbia High School—another reason Philip was so readily accepted by the family, though the proper Belle kept an eye on things. When Maxine proposed visiting her boyfriend in Chicago that fall, her mother quashed the idea: a girl who pursues a boy so obviously is not “conventional,” she explained, with some little severity.
“I was never a wise guy with parents,” Roth said of his younger self, whose perfect manners vis-à-vis the Groffskys were belied by his tendency—once he began sleeping over at their big five-bedroom house on Richmond Avenue—to skulk the halls after hours and have sex with Maxine. Still, he was careful not to betray certain Philip Wylie–esque perceptions of their garish prosperity and the way it shaped their souls; for Bob Heyman’s benefit, though, he tried to explain what he would later dramatize far better: “They are crude and solid and as happy as God will let them be, they are gluttonous and warm and fearful and sometimes loving and selfish and generous too; and that is their problem.” Certainly Paul Groffsky suspected none of this; that fall, Roth made a point of cheering on his potential future brother-in-law at the Northwestern game, in Evanston, and really he didn’t consider Paul a “lunkhead”—à la Ron in the novel—so much as “boring,” whereas Paul was at pains to point out, later, that he didn’t really own the Ann Arbor equivalent of a “Columbus record”—“E. E. Cummings reading to students (verse, silence, applause)”—though he did have a record of Big Ten fight songs that he played “more than once.”
The big point of the affair, for Roth, was sex—a rather prosaic business with Betty Powell, and anything but with Maxine, or Mackie as he called her. Nor was there any controversy about getting a diaphragm, since both were eager to enhance their pleasure, and indeed about the only detail Roth recalled of that transaction was Mackie’s breezy announcement afterward: “I’m wearing it.” At the beginning of September—a few days before he left for Chicago and she left for her freshman year at Cornell—the couple joined Stu Lehman and his fiancée at a rental house in Loch Arbour on the Jersey Shore. Lehman remembered thinking that Roth and his new girlfriend seemed “made for each other. . . . They were both very attractive people—tall, good-looking—and she seemed to be able to handle his acerbic sense of humor and his sexual appetites, at least as far as we knew.” At the time Roth professed to have low expectations for the teenager’s suitability as an intellectual companion, conceding to Heyman that “she has her charming moments, which it is often worth waiting for”; however, with respect to her way of slipping into his cabana, say, and blowing him before he changed into his trunks, he was considerably less ambivalent. “No doubt [Betty Powell] is far more understanding and clever than Mackie,” he wrote Heyman, “but I wonder what is more important. I was beginning to doubt my masculinity until Mackie responded so healthily and beautifully. It’s paradoxical, I think, that Betty, who is certainly more feminine than Maxine, should be the cold one, and that Maxine, the girl-boy, should play the role of the woman so much better.”