CHAPTER
Eight
THE BETTER TO GET ON W ITH HIS MILITARY SERVICE, Roth had turned down teaching jobs at the University of Nebraska (“Willa Cather I’m not”) and Concordia, a small college near Fargo. Sweating out his final term at Chicago, Roth prayed “the slaphappy Congress” would finally end the draft now that the war was over; then he hoped a bum knee (injured in a softball game when he was eleven) might render him 4F, but an army doctor on Governors Island officially declared him 1A that August. A fellow New Jersey boy and University of Chicago alumnus, Joe Josephson, had been told by a recruitment sergeant in Trenton that he could get away with a two-year service if he enlisted (versus the usual three or four years for volunteers), so he and Roth enlisted together on the same day, September 19, 1955. Roth was a little rueful over his decision, at Bucknell, to quit ROTC after a single semester because he was opposed to compulsory military training; if he’d taken advanced ROTC, he would have entered as a lieutenant instead of a private: “The first, though not the last, of the naive ‘principles’ with which I subverted myself,” he later reflected.
His first weeks, at Fort Dix, were even grimmer than expected. “They shall/or will never make a soldier out of me,” he wrote the Maurers on October 15; “and I shall never make literati (or whatever the hell it is) out of them. I shall grit my teeth for two years.” Roth’s barracks was a “hellhole” that had been, as recently as a week before, a stockade for African American prisoners. On arrival every two soldiers were given a bucket of hot soapy water and told to scrub every square inch of the walls, floors, and bed frames, as well as the row of twelve filthy toilets opposite twelve filthy sinks, and a “scummy, open communal shower (open to the toilets) at the far end.” This went on for two weeks, until basic training officially began on October 3, and still they hardly made “a dent in the filth”: “Everything smelled of shit all the time.”
Roth made friends with “a small contingent of the company who’d been to college”—a remarkably diverse group that included Barrington Boardman, Martin Garbus, and Matthew Andresino. The affable Boardman was an archetypal Wasp from Bridgeport, Connecticut: tall and square jawed, he’d come from ten generations of Yale and would later author a book titled From Harding to Hiroshima: An Anecdotal History of the United States from 1923 to 1945. Garbus, a Bronx Jew, would become a distinguished civil rights lawyer and occasional friend and jogging companion to Roth when both lived in Woodstock and Manhattan. As for Andresino, he was enduringly bemused by Roth’s fondness for a self-described “grubby Italian kid from Buffalo,” whom Roth called Wolly from the Italian guaglione (boy, urchin).
Roth’s time in the army would, if nothing else, afford material for one of his best stories, “Defender of the Faith,” about an unscrupulous Jewish soldier named Grossbart, who uses his religion (and whatever else) to get out of unpleasant duties. Marty Garbus claimed that Grossbart was based on “a wise-ass Jew” they’d known at Fort Dix named Sherry, “who was endlessly playing every single conceivable angle”; indeed, Roth remembered Sherry as one of three buddies who snuck off the base with him that fall, driving eighteen miles to his parents’ house in Moorestown, where everyone took hot showers and ate one of Bess’s home-cooked meals before dashing back in time to avoid detection.
When Andresino was told (in 2013) the basic plot of “Defender of the Faith,” he opined that Grossbart resembled no one so much as the author himself, remembering Roth’s ingenuity in evading the grubbier aspects of basic training. “Actually, though,” Roth had written Bob Heyman after his first week at Fort Dix, “I do not have too much to complain about, because, when upon the night of arrival the Sergeant asked who could type, my right arm went up faster then [sic] the world’s fastest erection. Since then I’ve gotten out of every indecent, undignified detail, and have been squatting before my weapon in the orderly room, typing out mess cards, morning reports, sick call crap, etc. I have found a home.” Even before Roth’s typing boondoggle—according to Andresino—he’d also gotten out of cleaning the barracks that first Friday night by excusing himself (“with great glee”) for religious services, and gave the same excuse every Friday thereafter. Nor was this just one man’s impression: Roth’s friend Joe Josephson remembered a time-test drill for which every soldier in the company had to assemble his rifle and report outside for inspection; Josephson was still struggling when Roth breezed past him en route to the parade ground, and would have gotten in trouble were it not for “a kind of crude character” who stayed behind to help him. “So the moral of the story is,” said Josephson, “you never know in an emergency who’s gonna come through for you.”
To be fair, there were many indecent, undignified details that Roth did not or could not evade. Every ten days he drew twenty hours of KP: peeling potatoes, ladling soup in the chow line, cleaning the grease trap, and so on. On the last day of basic, around midnight, he and another guy were wearily hefting a kettle of potatoes when Roth’s partner dropped his end and Roth yanked up so the kettle wouldn’t come down on the man’s toes. He felt a searing pain in his lower back, and when he woke up the next morning he could hardly walk—“the beginning of a lifetime’s back trouble,” he noted. During his two-week post-basic leave, Roth went to an osteopath in Moorestown who diagnosed the injury as a sprained sacroiliac, advising Roth to rest on a heating pad and not make any sudden, jerky movements.
Perhaps he bore that in mind with Maxine, though it doesn’t seem to have diminished the pleasure they continued to take in each other’s company. After basic, she came down from New York to visit him at his parents’ house, and on a couple of previous occasions she’d picked him up at Fort Dix for weekend leaves. “I would ride along in the backseat and when they got to New York they would dump me,” said Andresino, remembering with awe “the most beautiful woman you could imagine” spiriting his friend away. For his part Roth would later reminisce about the passionate way he and Groffsky “tore each other’s clothes off” at the door of their hotel room: “I haven’t done that in a while,” he mused at age seventy-nine. “I take them off nicely, I hang them up, I get in bed and I read. And I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed tearing the clothes off.”
WHEN HE RETURNED to Fort Dix in December, Roth was assigned to clerk-typist school, where his mother’s touch-type lessons stood him in good stead. The “brutally boring” course—eight hours a day for eight weeks—involved learning how to process reports and type up duty rosters, sick slips, etc., but as the best typist in class Roth would be given first dibs on his next assignment: “As it works out, the slow typists have all been going to Greenland and points even norther,” he wrote Heyman; “the fast boys (I am a fast boy) get the stateside assignments if they want them, or Europe.” At first Roth thought he’d plump for the free trip to Europe (“in my mind’s eye I am sleeping with a fetching Nazi-type blond, vigorous and catlike and washing my underwear and socks”), but when it came to a point he couldn’t leave Mackie, whom he thought, in certain moods, he might like to marry someday. By the time he graduated in February—and was presented with a silver identification bracelet for finishing first in his class (“You should be damn proud of this, Roth,” said the presiding major)—he’d chosen an assignment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.
The personnel officer at the hospital was impressed by Roth’s academic credentials and gave him a plum job in the Public Information Office, where his main task was interviewing new patients and writing press releases for their hometown newspapers. It was easy but tedious work, leavened only a little by the tumult surrounding Eisenhower’s admission as a patient, in June 1956, for an acute inflammation of the small intestine; Roth later claimed to have shaken the president’s hand, though mostly he interacted with a young man from the White House press office who’d commandeered his desk and “whose un-Daedalian Republican outlook on life it was my youthful duty to skewer heartlessly in sardonic letters to a girlfriend back in New Jersey.”
Roth’s fiction, meanwhile, had stalled amid the distractions of army life, as well as a sense that his apprenticeship had led him into a dead end. He didn’t want to write about sensitive children anymore, and when he tried writing about Jews—as in a novel, aborted after some thirty pages, “about an old Jew who can’t make up his mind between money and god”—the results were just as lugubrious. Given that he couldn’t seem to make compelling fiction out of his own experience, Roth found himself all too susceptible, still, to the influence of whatever writer he happened to be reading most intensively at the time. While in Chicago the previous March, Roth had reported to the Maurers that he’d written a story with “a little too much Hemingway in it,” and otherwise most of his effort was spent “vulcanizing [his] old stuff.” Finally he swore “not to write a goddam word for at least a year,” or at least until his critical and imaginative faculties were no longer at such fatal odds. So matters stood prior to his arrival at Walter Reed, where at last he had the means “to be a strict schedule abiding writer” again. “I’ve got to begin to work or else I’m sure I’ll give up on myself,” he wrote, “and I’m too—well, not good; but full of the rumor of promise to not give myself and writing a big decent chance. Well, I will.”
Perhaps the most important aesthetic lesson of Roth’s youth, via readings of The Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn, was “the power of a voice”—now if only he could find a voice that sounded more like his own. Crucially, around the time he worried about giving up on himself, he discovered The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and was struck by a “kind of high-faluting [sic] conversational tone I like,” and also by Saul Bellow’s willingness to indulge in sprawling narrative abundance, not at all constrained by Neo-Aristotelian concerns with form and structure. Interviewed for a 1993 BBC documentary on Roth, Bellow pointed out that he and his younger colleague were both “book-intoxicated street kids from American cities” and particularly applauded the quality in Roth’s work that was arguably most derived from his own—“a combination of street language and literary sophistication”—or, as Roth said of Bellow, “he has managed brilliantly to close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon.” While reading Augie March in 1956, it occurred to Roth that he himself had “ideas galore for stories”—stories with actual Jews in them, and Newark too.
That year he was further inspired by Bellow’s Seize the Day, with its vivid evocation of Jewish life on the Upper West Side—devoid of the sentimentality that marked the work of the “apologists, nostalgists, publicists, and propagandists” who had dominated Jewish American fiction prior to Bellow. And Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant was “the next clump on the head,” as Roth put it, “which is you can write about the Jewish poor, you can write about the Jewish inarticulate, you can describe things near at hand, like a grocery store. . . . And that had a terrific impact on me.” Though it would take decades for Roth to render Newark with the kind of painstaking, reportorial detail characteristic of his American Trilogy, the sketchy beginnings of such a project were inspired by Malamud’s Brooklyn and Bellow’s Chicago and Upper West Side. By the time The Assistant was published, in 1957, Roth had taken his first real steps toward an awesome maturity, and so was moved to write the Maurers with a hubris only somewhat tongue-in-cheek: “[Malamud] and Bellow are the only two people, outside of me, that are writing things worth reading.” And Roth was reading everything they published—the Malamud stories soon to be collected in The Magic Barrel, for instance, which he snapped up “the day they appeared” in Partisan Review and Commentary. Far from the Runyonesque eloquence of Augie March and company, the Yiddish-inflected immigrant speech found in Malamud was “a heap of broken verbal bones that looked, until he came along and made them dance to his sad tune, to be of use no longer to anyone other than a Borscht Belt comic or a professional nostalgist.” And Malamud’s people were something of both, and this too was a revelation: you could feel sorry for his Jewish failures but also laugh at them; their wry acceptance of every kind of misery reminded Roth of the “eerie clowning” of Beckett’s Molloy and Malone.
Of these two masters, and rivals, Bellow would prove the more congenial—a matter of temperament as much as style. A great admirer of Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, Roth was in awe—but a little skeptical too—of what would ultimately seem the “revolutionary” exuberance of Augie March: a rejection of the alienated, conscience-haunted ethos of Bellow’s first two novels, of Kafka and Dostoyevsky, of formal niceties altogether, a doffing of the “Flaubertian corset” (as their friend Richard Stern put it) that bristled against everything Roth had soberly accepted at the University of Chicago. “As for Augie March,” Roth noted in 1956, “I can’t bring myself to say good things of it, though one sort of feels obliged to in its huge presence.” Its presence would only grow huger as Roth advanced in his own work—a little awkwardly at first, with the meandering set pieces of his first novel, Letting Go, and thence to the ranting flamboyance of Portnoy and other novels, an effect that would become so typically Rothian that Alfred Kazin dubbed it “the aria bit.” Finally, having attained a like eminence, Roth was ideally receptive to Bellow’s reminiscence (for Roth’s benefit) of his “triumphant feeling,” after a long creative malaise, when he wrote the first paragraph of Augie March: “In the next two years I seldom looked into Fowler’s Modern English Usage.” Roth would often quote Augie’s first six words as a declaration of independence: “I am an American, Chicago born.” An American—not a Jew, not a Jewish American, but a fully immersed participant in the commotion of American life. Indeed, like Roth’s previous literary idol, Wolfe, Bellow had discovered America as a grand subject—but, as Roth liked to say, “where Wolfe was merely a half-genius with the limitations of a half-genius, Bellow was a complete genius without any limitations I could see.” For Roth, the only twentieth-century American writer of comparable stature was Faulkner.
After dinner each night at Walter Reed, Roth would return to his typewriter in the Public Information Office and work on his fiction until ten o’clock, and it was here he wrote his first Philip Roth story, so to speak. The previous August, he and his Chicago friends—Haber, Targan, and Geffen—had gathered in Greenwich Village to celebrate their master’s degrees, and a tipsy Geffen had told them about a kid in his Brooklyn Hebrew school who’d once threatened to jump off the synagogue roof. As Roth was leaving (early, sober) he took Geffen aside and asked whether he planned to use the anecdote in his fiction; Roth agreed to give him five years before he, Roth, appropriated the story, though in fact he waited all of seven months. “I’ve never been so in control in my life,” he remarked after finishing “The Conversion of the Jews.” “I junked stuff, re-wrote, thought long and deeply (as I can, anyway), paced, bitched, wrote heatedly. All the things writers are supposed to do. It all worked, I think (and hope). I have never felt more like a writer in my life.”
In Geffen’s anecdote the boy went up to the roof as a random prank, but Roth makes it a matter of heated debate, between Oscar (Ozzie) Freedman and his fellow Hebrew students, about the Immaculate Conception. “ ‘To have a baby you gotta get laid,’ Itzie theologized. ‘Mary hadda get laid.’ ” But Ozzie insists that a God who can make heaven and earth in six days can also “let a woman have a baby without having intercourse,” and when he puts the question to their teacher, Rabbi Binder, the exasperated man ends up smacking him in the nose. Fleeing to the roof, Ozzie threatens to jump before a growing audience that includes his mother, the Fire Department, his ecstatic classmates, and of course the mortified rabbi, who’s forced to kneel with the others and recant his position that Jesus was merely “historical.” Both he and Ozzie’s mother have struck the boy because of his doctrinal impudence, and so Ozzie ends the public shaming with a moral—“You shouldn’t hit me about God”—before jumping into a firemen’s net “like an overgrown halo.” The resolution is a little pat, but the story’s considerable virtues include characters who speak (“And what do you gotta open your mouth!”) and look exactly as they should—“a round, tired, gray-haired penguin of a woman” in the case of Ozzie’s mother, who “didn’t look like a chosen person” even when she dressed up. A nice illustration, in short, of the “combination of street language and literary sophistication” noted by Bellow.*
BEFORE HE LEFT for Walter Reed and they for Europe, Roth had assured his friends Andresino and Boardman that he would get out of the army in six months because of his bad back; a few months later, overseas, the two received a postcard—“I’m out”—and laughed, assuming their wily pal had pulled another fast one. In fact he was in agony, and while working at Walter Reed he’d seemed to get worse by the day. In April, an army doctor gave Roth a back brace for what he said was a lumbosacral strain—“what they used to call a touch of lumbago,” as Roth put it in his 1962 story based on the ordeal, “Novotny’s Pain.” Roth tried toughing it out for a month or so, until he could no longer bend over to pull his socks on and tie his shoelaces—an office performed each morning by a kindly barracks mate, Nelson Goldberg, a biochemist who worked in the hospital laboratories.†
Finally Roth went on sick call and was admitted to Walter Reed as a patient; now diagnosed with a herniated disk, he refused surgery because he didn’t want to be operated on by army doctors—whereupon a skeptical psychiatrist-colonel accused him of malingering and sent him to a dreary rehabilitation hospital in the Maryland woods, Forest Glen, where he was surrounded by amputees who moaned and cried out in their sleep. Roth was stunned by the injustice of it: “I was learning how things happen independently of one’s own massive exertions,” he wrote forty years later, “how all one’s planning, tenacity, ingenuity and forcefulness can mean nothing and come to nothing. I was getting a tiny whiff of how unsweet life can smell.” When Roth refused to accept that he was “passive-aggressive”—that his pain was a “somatic” manifestation of his resentment toward the army (“Somatic my ass,” he wrote the Maurers)—the psychiatrist threatened to classify him as “unfit” and recommend him for an undesirable discharge. As an army psychiatrist explains to Novotny, “It’s what we use to get the crackpots out—bed-wetters, homos, petty thieves, malingerers, and so on.”
Roth languished at Forest Glen for a month, until it occurred to him to phone his Democratic congressman, Frank Thompson, and tell his story to an assistant. A week later, in mid-July, he was returned to Walter Reed for a meeting with the Medical Discharge Board, which awarded him (“to my astonishment”) an honorary discharge with a 20 percent disability pension, or about thirty dollars a month. The pension was overturned less than a year later, however, when it was determined that Roth’s “injury existed prior to service”; outraged, he solicited testimonials to the contrary from Haber and others, but the decision stood.
Suddenly at loose ends, Roth returned to his parents’ house in Moorestown and tried to find a job before his separation pay ran out. By then he was a rather attractive prospect—what with his master’s degree and a story in that year’s Foley anthology—and received a number of modest but interesting offers. “Thanks for sending me that nice young man,” William Shawn wrote his former secretary, Charlotte Maurer, after interviewing Roth at The New Yorker. Roth, in turn, found Shawn to be “very kind, in his gnome-like way,” though he was thrown by Shawn’s diffident observation that perhaps Roth considered his own work “too avant-garde” for the magazine. “I stammered for a moment,” Roth wrote the editor afterward, “but what I wanted to say, I think, is that I like to think of myself as not avant-garde, or rear-guard, or New Yorker, or Partisan Review, but as Myself.” By way of evidence he submitted “The Conversion of the Jews,” and a month later (“We are constitutionally slow”) was offered a fact-checking job. He also met with one of his brother Sandy’s colleagues at J. Walter Thompson, Charles Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend, who was then working as a script editor for Kraft Television Theatre. Jackson—who struck Roth as nice but “rather sheepish”—offered him a job synopsizing scripts at seventy-five dollars a week, and also arranged for him to meet with Jackson’s publisher, Roger Straus, who wore a yachting cap and offered Roth a copy-editing job. Roth declined, though the two would meet again some twenty years later, when Straus became his publisher.
Roth was mulling his options when he received a telegram from Napier Wilt in Chicago: an instructorship on the freshman composition faculty had opened up at the last minute; it paid four thousand a year and would give Roth the freedom to write, especially during long academic holidays, and also pursue his Ph.D. “I was flabbergasted,” he noted at the time, “and wrote back yes, yes, yes, I would.” He was about to leave in mid-September when he was felled by an attack of back pain so severe he was unable to walk for nearly a week. Spooked, he went to Philadelphia with Maxine and was examined by two different doctors. The first, at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, told him he had two herniated disks that would require immediate surgery; Roth almost fainted at the news—likely the end of his once-in-a-lifetime chance to become one of the youngest faculty members at the University of Chicago. Fortunately, the second doctor found only a single herniated disk and recommended that Roth wear an ungainly steel brace for six months, followed by physical therapy. “In the meantime,” Roth wrote the Maurers, “I am to do without swimming, tennis, and violent sexual encounters, not to mention casual, peaceful ones. It will be a long six months.”
In 1998, the writer Ben Yagoda was combing old New Yorker files in the course of researching his book about the magazine, and noticed Roth had been offered a fact-checking job forty-two years before. He dropped Roth a note, asking what had happened, and Roth explained that he’d decided to take the job in Chicago, “and proceeded almost immediately to fuck up my life for the next ten years.”