CHAPTER
Ten
TOM ROGERS INTRODUCED ROTH TO HIS FRIEND DICK Stern, a fellow Iowa Workshop graduate who taught creative writing at Chicago. Stern was five years older than Roth and married (unhappily) with two children; he’d published a few stories in little magazines and was working on his first novel. That spring of 1957, Dean Wilt gave Stern two thousand dollars to invite four writers to campus at five hundred apiece—a distinguished roster that comprised Bellow, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, and Ralph Ellison. Bellow came on May 1 and agreed to preside over two classes: one for discussing his own work, the other for discussing a student’s.
Bellow’s visit was especially momentous. In recent years his reputation had been bolstered by the first of three National Book Awards, for Augie March, and the subsequent publication of his acclaimed novella Seize the Day. Casting about for a manuscript worthy of their guest, Stern asked to mimeograph “The Conversion of the Jews,” though Roth wasn’t one of his students, and—Stern’s admiration notwithstanding—the story had been briskly refused by The New Yorker and various quarterlies. While the anonymous author sat in back of the class, discreetly silent, the twenty or so students discussed the story a little severely until Bellow took his turn—a cherished moment preserved in The Ghost Writer, where Bellow appears in the thin disguise of Felix Abravanel, who defends Nathan Zuckerman’s story (“largely with his laugh”) against the “orthodox Forsterites” who think its characters lack the “round” quality prescribed by Aspects of the Novel. After class Roth was thrilled when he was invited to join Bellow and Stern for coffee at the Reynolds Club—though he sensed Bellow’s breezy charm was a species of aloofness, and in fact Bellow “left [Roth] where he found [him]” rather than help place his admirable story. Still, Roth had made a definite impression on the great man, who would remember “Conversion” as “the real thing”: “When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around,” he wrote Roth twelve years later, “and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.”
Because of his appearance in the Foley anthology, Roth had returned to campus as a minor celebrity, and editors at the Chicago Review were eager to publish more of his work. That spring Roth gave them a little satire, “Positive Thinking on Pennsylvania Avenue,” making fun of a folksy bedtime prayer the president liked to say, according to the positive-thinking guru Norman Vincent Peale. As Roth wrote, “ ‘Lord,’ the President’s prayer begins, ‘I want to thank You for helping me today. You really stuck by me. . . .’ The Lord is not so much his shepherd, Mr. Eisenhower indicates, as his helper, his aide-de-camp.” The author goes on like that, swinging a heavy rubber mallet at some pretty broad targets; the intelligentsia’s rabid distaste for Ike seems a bit much these days, given certain of his successors, but the editor of The New Republic, Gilbert Harrison, was happy to reprint the piece for his June 3, 1957, issue, and the author was reviled in a subsequent letters column. “[T]he most distasteful article I have ever read in The New Republic,” one reader wrote. “[A] fatuous piece of boorishness,” said another, “and in wretched taste.”
By then Harrison had already asked the young wag if he’d like a gig reviewing TV shows for the magazine; Roth replied that he’d prefer to review movies, even though he rarely went to the movies and, by his own admission, had “never read a movie review in [his] life.” Later he’d dismiss his work in the genre as “unreadable, rich with snide condescension and little more,” but at the time he was simply delighted by the chance to ridicule popular culture for a wide audience and make easy money doing it (twenty-five bucks a review). Because of Roth’s determination to enjoy himself—versus any serious attempt to grapple with aesthetics, since he viewed almost all movies as ipso facto crap—certain of his pieces have worn well regardless of their nominal subjects. “Miss [Audrey] Hepburn brings to the role her usual elfishness,” he wrote of Love in the Afternoon; “she is certainly a handsome young woman, but there continues to be something a bit wearing about an elf that knows it’s an elf.” Perhaps inspired by his shtick with the ineffable Geffen, Roth wrote his “review” of The Sun Also Rises (starring an ill, sallow-faced Tyrone Power as the impotent Jake Barnes) in the form of a Hemingway dialogue between the critic and a poule he meets outside the movie theater:
“But Jake has this wound—” the poule began.
“That’s tough all right,” I said, “but not seedy.”
She took it for a pun. “You are a hard man.”
“What the hell,” I said, “what the hell.”
As it happened, Roth also wrote the odd piece about TV; indeed, his favorite contribution to The New Republic was a definitive take on the Miss America pageant as it then existed, “Coronation on Channel Two,” in which he described lovely young contestants having to “extricate” themselves “from the gleeful ooze secreted by the master of ceremonies, Bert Parks.”
After a few months, though, the weekly chore began to pall, and besides Roth was sick of the magazine’s “butchers” who chopped his prose to “smithereens.” The sinecure had provided enough money to buy a ten-year-old Plymouth from his cousin Kenny in Newark, and meanwhile Roth was replaced at The New Republic by Stanley Kauffmann, a less funny but more responsible critic who would hold the post for forty-five years, until his death in 2013.
AFTER THAT FIRST pregnancy scare, Roth entertained thoughts of keeping his distance from Maggie; by then, however, their friends perceived them as a couple and tended to invite them over as such. Also Maggie was eager to prove her usefulness, as when Roth had “a bad siege with [his] back” in May, and “Maggie cared for [him], kindly, sweetly,” as he wrote the Maurers. She was willing to be of use in less conventional ways, too. Roth admired the charms of a certain graduate assistant for the Committee on Social Thought, Diane, who made a point of attending weekly Social Sciences teas—arranged by the secretary, Maggie—because she was poor and hungry and the food was free. At some point Maggie became “inordinately interested” in her, as Diane recalled, suggesting a threesome with her boyfriend, Philip Roth, a campus wunderkind the woman was eager to meet. In retrospect Diane had “no doubt” Maggie was the instigator, and Roth also said that Maggie was the one who “pushed for it” (“ ‘Let’s fuck Diane’ ”). For her part Maggie noted a “Story idea” about two lovers who are both “imaginative” and “intelligent”: “He one day suggests it would be exciting to introduce a 3rd person. She is shocked by the idea.”
As Roth remembered the logistics of the occasion (chez Maggie), Diane and Maggie went into the bedroom first, followed by Diane and Roth, and finally the three went in together. Since Diane was essentially a lesbian, Roth “felt terribly left out” (“If I start crying, you’ll have to understand”); waiting for the two women to emerge, he said, was like “waiting for a haircut.” In fact, it was hardly a red-letter evening for either Roth or their guest; afterward the two met for coffee and agreed the whole thing had been peculiarly uncomfortable, perhaps because Maggie seemed so keen on controlling things. Diane made a point of avoiding the Social Sciences secretary thereafter, but was left with “the distinct impression that Maggie was determined to marry Philip Roth. . . . She wasn’t good-looking, she didn’t strike one as intellectually ambitious, but she certainly was one of the most determined people I ever met.”
Roth had hoped to spend the summer of 1957 working on his fiction at the Yaddo or MacDowell art colonies, but both turned him down. Instead he drove to Falmouth, Cape Cod, at the end of June, agreeing to pick up Maggie in Boston a week or so later, when her own vacation was due. Alone with his thoughts, Roth had dire misgivings. Since the pregnancy, especially, his arguments with Maggie had become fierce, and he was unsettled by the novelty of her rage; it occurred to him that the only time he’d ever “seen anybody in the flesh enraged” was during that terrible argument with his father six years before. (“How the hell do I know where you are! You could be in a whorehouse!”) Now it was an almost daily occurrence. A weeklong tryst on Cape Cod with “a quiet, easygoing, plainish girl”—an education major at Boston University who was waiting tables at a local restaurant—made the prospect of Maggie’s turbulence all the more disheartening. Sure enough, she arrived in Boston with her guns loaded, furious that Roth hadn’t stayed with her in Chicago that summer. For three days they wrangled about this and related matters, until Roth threw in the sponge: he would drive her to New York, he proposed, while he caught up with his parents in Moorestown. In the car Maggie weepily harangued him: she had only two weeks of vacation a year, and he’d ruined it! The least he could do was take her along to meet his parents, the way he’d taken Maxine and Betty, or wasn’t she good enough . . .? “When she wouldn’t stop I wanted to kill her,” said Roth. “Instead I took her home with me.”
The visit went poorly, and not because Maggie wasn’t Jewish. His parents had gotten along fine with Betty Powell, after all, and were even a little disappointed when Philip hadn’t married her. (Of course, being a shiksa was hardly an asset. Joan Roth, a cousin, remembered how Bess and Herman had routinely warned her away from the goyim: “ ‘You’re a Jew, of course you date a Jew. You marry a Jew! . . . You can’t trust a goy. He’ll love you and leave you!’ The irony,” said Joan, “was that I did marry a gentile and the first words he learned was shiker shagitz”—drunk gentile.) As for Maggie, she was a perfect package of folly, the gist of which Roth conveyed in The Facts: “No, what they saw to frighten them wasn’t the shiksa but a hard-up loser four years my senior, a penniless secretary and divorced mother of two small children, who, as she was quick to explain at dinner the first night, had been ‘stolen’ from her by her ex-husband.” Somehow Bess made it through breakfast the next morning, and when she asked Philip and the woman whether they had any laundry from their trip, Maggie gladly surrendered her dirty underwear. “I cannot do this woman’s laundry,” Bess told her son in the kitchen an hour later (in The Facts, Roth has her walking three miles to Maple Shade, weeping, to complain to Herman of this final indignity). “She will have to go.” In the car Maggie asked to say goodbye to Philip’s father, in whose office she complained bitterly about how rudely she’d been treated. Herman listened with an air of managerial sympathy, careful however to call the woman Mrs. Miller. Finally Philip drove her on to New York, where she presently caught a plane back to Chicago, whither he himself was due to return a month later.
FOR VARIOUS REASONS Roth had hoped for a change of venue once he got started on his Ph.D. From Harvard he anticipated a fellowship worth at least $1,500, and at the last moment he also applied to Columbia “just in case Harvard falls through. . . . Trilling and Barzun and Eric Bentley sound more exciting than a return to Walter Blair and Company.” Both programs accepted Roth but without stipends, whereas Chicago offered $1,000 and Dean Wilt sweetened the deal with another $1,500 if Roth would agree to teach a section of composition. Thus Roth found himself back in Chicago, again as a graduate student, that fall. Along with Wilt’s class on Henry James (“Just now I put down Portrait of A Lady, and wonder what my writing efforts will ever amount to next to that”), he took Contemporary Criticism and Anglo-Saxon, the last of which he particularly loathed.
Somehow Roth managed to evolve as a fiction writer while keeping up with the demands of a doctoral program and grinding out weekly pieces for The New Republic.* Another milestone was tagged that fall, when he sold “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings”—his story about Albie and Duke, the tough Italian kids in his freshman homeroom at Weequahic—to Commentary, which he’d been reading devotedly since he first discovered it in the periodical room at Bucknell. Though the magazine would someday launch a number of scathing attacks on his work and person, at the time Roth found it a liberating guide for intellectual American Jews of his generation, who “wanted to leave [their] narrow backgrounds, but maintain [them]selves as Jewish men.” In Commentary he encountered the work of not only Bellow and Malamud, but other favorites such as Isaac Rosenfeld’s ribald analysis of the kosher laws, “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” and Wallace Markfield’s sardonic look at Jewish family life in Brooklyn, “The Country of the Crazy Horse.” (“The novelist, what’s his name, Markfield,” muses Portnoy, “has written in a story somewhere that until he was fourteen he believed ‘aggravation’ to be a Jewish word.”) “I thought, ‘Boy I’m in it, it’s great,’ ” Roth remembered, thinking of the first time he visited the New York offices of Commentary and met its then editor, Martin Greenberg (brother of the art critic Clement), who quickly became a friend: “He’d read everything, but he talked like a guy from the neighborhood.” It’s noteworthy, however, that the actual person who plucked Roth’s first story out of the slush pile was a recently hired assistant editor, Norman Podhoretz, who would become one of Roth’s most bitter enemies once he took over as editor in chief, in 1960, and eventually led the magazine in a gallingly different direction.
Back in January 1957, Roth had finished the first draft of a sixty-two-page novella, Expect the Vandals, inspired by a news story about Japanese soldiers in the Philippines who didn’t know the emperor had surrendered and so remained hidden away on one of the islands. “You’ll be especially happy to know that there is not a Jew or a child (or an adolescent for that matter) in the entire thing,” Roth wrote the Maurers, pleased that he’d managed to “barrel through” such an extended piece of work, though he realized it would need “a radical rewriting” (involving, among other things, his turning one of the main characters into at least a nominal Jew, Moe Malamud). Five months later, Roth sent a revised version to Ballantine for consideration as part of their New Short Novels series, and by the time they returned it, in September, Roth had received an intriguing invitation from the new assistant fiction editor at Esquire, Gene Lichtenstein, who recalled:
Philip sent in a satire of ornithologists and it was terrible, really terrible. I’m not sure why, but instead of sending a rejection slip back, I wrote a note on the back of the slip saying, “This is terrible. You should be ashamed of yourself. You obviously know how to write, so why don’t you send me the best short story you have?” And by return mail I got a seventy-five-page manuscript, Expect the Vandals. I read it and sent back a letter saying “This is flawed but I’m really interested. Do you want to work on it?” . . . So we went back and forth, and he kept changing it.
By the time “Expect the Vandals” was accepted for the December 1958 issue, it had been trimmed down from novella length and polished to a high shine, and was probably better than its author would later remember (always with a shudder). Moe and Ken are the only survivors of an attempted landing on a Japanese-occupied atoll; the story’s original germ is touched on, provocatively, in its opening pages, when Moe observes from a ledge as the Japanese stragglers learn of their defeat: “Thirty-nine Japs had lined up, rifles in mouth. At the command, the triggers were pulled, and the tops of heads sailed into the air like confetti.” Jewishness is not a salient issue in the story, unless one associates Jewishness with the kind of sensitivity and discernment that Moe possesses and his buddy, Ken, does not, hence the poignancy of their interdependence. Queer studies scholars (who would come to show a remarkable degree of interest in Roth’s work) may one day rediscover the all-but-forgotten “Expect the Vandals,” with its startlingly overt homoeroticism: Moe’s nursing of the crippled Ken entails brushing a fly away from his naked groin, and kissing his forehead in a burst of tenderness.
Perhaps the main importance of “Vandals” was the paycheck—$850—almost as much as Roth’s entire fellowship from the university. “I laughed all the way to the bank,” he said, when Solotaroff gloomily observed that the story wasn’t as funny as Roth’s pieces in The New Republic. And that wasn’t all: a year later, Columbia Pictures bought the dramatic rights for $2,000 plus a 10 percent cut of the profits—a meager sum by movie standards, but the production was low budget and anyway it was all gravy to Roth.†
By then he’d already decided to quit school after a single quarter and devote his time to writing and teaching. “I strangled on Anglo-Saxon,” he wrote Miss Martin, “and kept thinking about stories I wanted to write while talking about stories Henry James did write.” Roth had other reasons to settle for an incomplete in Anglo-Saxon. After “The Conversion of the Jews” had been rejected for the third and fourth times—by Kenyon Review and Botteghe Oscure (“Those guineas’ll take anything,” Roth had mistakenly predicted of the latter)—the author “hopelessly” sent it off to The Paris Review, where it languished in a slush pile for five months before falling into the hands of a reader, Rose Styron, whose famous husband, William, was among Roth’s most admired near contemporaries. A few years later she’d have occasion to tell Roth in person about her role in publishing one of his best-known stories—the beginning of a lifelong friendship with the couple. For now she considered the story “marvelous,” but would have to wait for final approval from the editor, George Plimpton, who was then in Cuba. “Why the hell did he go, is what I want to know,” Roth complained to the Maurers. As he would shortly learn, Plimpton had gone to Cuba to conduct his famous interview with Hemingway, and that interview would appear, with “Conversion,” in the Spring 1958 issue. Roth’s story would receive further exposure in The Best American Short Stories of 1959.
Hemingway was on his mind when he decided to depart that summer for an indefinite stay in Europe (“Hemingway didn’t get his Ph.D.,” he remarked to Cousin Florence). Meanwhile Wilt gave him two sections of composition in the spring, and Roth also agreed to teach a weekly night class in creative writing at the university’s Downtown College, an extension mostly attended by adults with day jobs. For his introductory lecture, “The Strategies and Intentions of Fiction,” Roth conscientiously recited twenty-five pages replete with the wisdom of Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Henry James, et al., then asked for questions; there was only one—from a neatly dressed, middle-aged black woman: “Professor, I know that if you’re writing a friendly letter to a little boy, you write on the envelope ‘Master.’ But what if you’re writing a friendly letter to a little girl? Do you still say ‘Miss’—or just what do you say?”
SINCE FINISHING “VANDALS,” Roth had lost no time embarking on a full-blown novel, alternately titled The Interpreter and The Go-Between, about a Jewish American businessman who travels to Frankfurt to shoot a German, any German, as revenge for their crimes against the Jews. Roth was a little stymied by the fact that he’d never been to Germany—or had any experiences at all, really, similar to those of his characters—and yet he was certain the idea itself would sustain the writing of what was sure to be “a powerful moral document. . . . All I can say is that I think the book suggests that by 1957 the crimes have become so gross, so complex, the guilt so impossible to pin down, forgiveness impossible to portion out . . . that morality, as always, takes a God to understand.” Five months later Roth was still convinced his novel was “exciting and crucial (the story and the issues I mean),” though he’d managed to eke out fewer than a hundred pages despite interest from an editor at Random House, who wanted to see a manuscript when Roth came to New York for his spring vacation.
Around this time Roth was also considering a long, comic story about the Groffskys—this after a lunch at the University Tavern with Dick Stern, an avid laughing audience for Roth’s adventures “in Jewish suburbia with the dazzling daughter of a prosperous dealer in plate glass.” “Write that, for God’s sake!” said Stern, as they walked back to campus. At first Roth was skeptical: “I wanted to be morally serious like Joseph Conrad. I wanted to exhibit my dark knowledge like Faulkner. I wanted to be deep like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write literature. Instead I took Dick’s advice and wrote Goodbye, Columbus.” Such advice was based on what Stern (and others) had observed as “a discrepancy between Philip as he told stories and Philip as he wrote stories”; Stern thought Wilt’s “heaping Henry James” on Roth was helpful only up to a point, whereas Stern was pushing him toward a reckoning akin to Bellow’s abrupt rejection of literature, or literary good manners, when it came to writing Augie March—a novel about life as he really knew it, evoked in a voice inimitably his own.
As for big ideas, they were already baked into the Patimkin saga: an encounter between a striving young intellectual—steeped (no doubt) in the highbrow class attitudes of Riesman, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and the like—and the “pig heaven” (Bellow’s term) of newly assimilated Jews learning how to adapt to the country-club culture of midcentury America. Later Roth would faintly deplore his Chicagobred intellectual smugness, which he was at pains to spell out in his preface to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Goodbye, Columbus, referring to himself in the third-person: “His cultural ambitions were formulated in direct opposition to the triumphant, suffocating American philistinism of that time: he despised Time, Life, Hollywood, television, the best-seller list, advertising copy, McCarthyism, Rotary Clubs, racial prejudice, and the American booster mentality.” And yet his genial and even nostalgic condescension vis-à-vis the Patimkins would prove an ideal vantage point, and, relieved of the burden to animate ideas per se, Roth learned he “could hit long fungos,” as he later put it—a baseball trope echoed in an unpublished fragment about Zuckerman’s ecstatic discovery of his powers: “He would pound his fists on the walls of the little apartment in an expression of delight, of wonder with himself. And cry out loud, ‘C’mon baby, c’mon baby,’ like an infielder talking-up his pitcher. . . . A thousand perfect words a day: the wit! the tone! the mean asides! The conversations he simply seemed to take off some spool in his head! His head—could it be?—the head of a genius?”
Since he was dealing directly with raw, recent experience—and finding a slyly ironic voice in the process—Roth would later deny there were any “literary antecedents” for Goodbye, Columbus. In many respects, though, it stands as a kind of Jewish Gatsby, given the charm of its prose and humor, its concision, and its theme of meretricious American-style success. Fitzgerald was on Roth’s mind when he referred to the jaunty, athletic Maxine as Jordan Baker, but the equivalent of Brenda, in terms of the story, is pure Daisy Buchanan—the golden girl with “two wet triangles” on the back of her polo shirt (after strenuous tennis with “Simp” Stolowitch), “where her wings would have been if she’d had a pair. . . . The smallness of the wings did not bother me—it would not take an eagle to carry me up those lousy hundred and eighty feet that make summer nights so much cooler in Short Hills than they are in Newark.” Neil is both Nick Carraway and a bookish, manqué Gatsby, never less than skeptical about the Patimkins and their prizes (“Gold dinnerware, sporting-good trees, nectarines, garbage disposals, bumpless noses”), and yet lyrical about the larger Jewish success story they embody—“a story of the West” tracing the progress of postimmigrant generations “towards the edge of Newark, then out of it, and up the slope of the Orange Mountains, until they had reached the crest and started down the other side, pouring into Gentile territory as the Scotch-Irish had poured through the Cumberland Gap.”
For Roth, the main advantage of writing a book such as Goodbye, Columbus, instead of his Conradian Frankfurt opus, was that he discovered how funny and shrewd he could be, on paper, given a peripheral narrator whose main function is to find Jewish correlatives for Gatsby’s “gorgeous pink rag of a suit”—the whole zany fantasia of American gentility. The playlet of Neil’s first dinner with the Patimkins does in fact read like a conversation “he simply seemed to take off some spool in his head,” yet every line highlights, wittily, some fundamental aspect of the speaker, and in a single brief exchange we comprehend the family tout court:
MR. P.: He eats like a bird.
JULIE: Certain birds eat a lot.
BRENDA: Which ones?
MRS. P.: Let’s not talk about animals at the dinner table. Brenda, why do you encourage her? . . .
Mrs. Patimkin’s prim, wistful admonition is also reflected (obliquely) in her lunkhead son’s affected fondness for “semi-classical” music such as Kostelanetz and Mantovani, though given his druthers he’d listen to his Columbus record for the umpteenth time, mooning over his bygone glory on the basketball court,‡ and meanwhile Mrs. Patimkin’s twin sisters, Rose and Pearl, appear at Ron’s wedding with white hair “the color of Lincoln convertibles.”
Writing “a thousand perfect words a day” (or thereabouts), as if he were simply taking it off a spool, Roth finished his comic novella in roughly a month and declared it “positively the best thing I’ve done.” Suddenly he felt “in league with Malamud,” and his friend Solotaroff agreed that both Roth and Malamud, with Bellow, were engaged in a similar project of “adapting [Yiddishkeit] to modernism.” One evening—after a long day poring over antique issues of the Boston Evening Transcript for his dissertation on James’s sources for The Bostonians—Solotaroff stopped at Roth’s apartment to drink a beer and listen to his friend read this early passage from his work in progress:
Though I am very fond of desserts, especially fruit, I chose not to have any. I wanted, this hot night, to avoid the conversation that revolved around my choosing fresh fruit over canned fruit, or canned fruit over fresh fruit; whichever I preferred, Aunt Gladys always had an abundance of the other jamming her refrigerator like stolen diamonds. “He wants canned peaches, I have a refrigerator full of grapes I have to get rid of . . .” Life was a throwing off for poor Aunt Gladys, her greatest joys were taking out the garbage, emptying her pantry, and making threadbare bundles for what she still referred to as the Poor Jews in Palestine. I only hope she dies with an empty refrigerator, otherwise she’ll ruin eternity for everyone else, what with her Velveeta turning green, and her navel oranges growing fuzzy jackets down below.
Solotaroff recognized the shtick as the kind of thing bandied about with Geffen at University Tavern (“The fruit routine was in fact a variation of the two-neckties joke”§)—but then, too, this deft sketch of familial bemusement was “something new” in American fiction: “Roth was making public . . . the mentality of many of us who were trying now to liberate ourselves from twenty centuries, or so it felt, of communal solidarity, moral authoritarianism, and adaptive hypocrisy.” At any rate, Roth didn’t so much as look at his Frankfurt novel during the month or so he spent working on Goodbye, Columbus.
AFTER THEIR NIGHTMARE summer vacation in Massachusetts and Moorestown, Roth and Maggie somehow managed to reconcile during the fall; by late January 1958, however, the affair seemed over for good, or so Roth reported a little apologetically to the Maurers: “I am always telling you that so and so and I are no longer seeing each other, and I guess the reason is always the same—marriage.” He assured his friends he was very sad about things, but really it couldn’t be helped. As for Maggie, she dealt with heartbreak by deciding to keep a journal (“under the influence of Virginia Woolf”), and her first entry recorded a “moving experience” with a delicatessen owner, who wondered why such a “good looking girl” didn’t have a boyfriend on Saturday night: “I replied there were some but not the one I wanted. He then got me frozen bagels.”
Perhaps the most notable outcome of Roth’s Anglo-Saxon course was that he briefly dated one of his classmates, Susan Glassman, a soignée Radcliffe graduate who lived on Lake Shore Drive, the daughter of an orthopedic surgeon who’d been team doctor for the Chicago Bears and the Blackhawks. Remembering the experience, Roth would invariably describe the woman as “a pain in the ass”: she was forever expecting him to drop everything and take her to the hairdresser or some such, and he would do it, and still she “resisted [his] advances.” On February 10, she accompanied Roth to a lecture at the Hillel House given by Bellow, who, it so happened, had met Glassman on a previous occasion at Bard College. “I’m just going to go up and say hello to him,” she told Roth afterward, and that was pretty much the last he saw of Glassman, who would become the third Mrs. Bellow in 1961. “Turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Roth, “and the worst thing that ever happened to Saul.”
Also in attendance at Hillel House was Maggie, who gave a brittle laugh when Roth came over to say hello. “Well,” she said, “if that’s what you like—!” When Roth went home that night he found a terse note in his mailbox “to the effect that a rich and spoiled Jewish clotheshorse was exactly what I deserved.” Maggie meant it, too. That night, in full Nancy Morrow mode, she wrote in her journal: “Philip appeared at the lecture with Susan and it was a relief for I couldn’t be jealous of her—She’s a petulant self-concerned girl of a type I find at best boring and at worst a nuisance. Instead, I was able to feel emancipated from him for if he really wants this sort of girl then I see him as a different person that I don’t really recognize and that I certainly don’t want.” For a time Roth also dated an editorial assistant at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose impression on Maggie, if any, went unrecorded. All such matters became moot when Dick Stern played “a disastrous Cupid role,” as he later put it, by inviting his friend Philip and his former babysitter Maggie to his thirtieth birthday party on February 25. Before Roth quite knew what was happening, he and Maggie “began to see each other again,” as he wrote the Maurers, “for company’s sake, and then, and then, etc.”
Perhaps he figured he’d soon be a free man in Europe—a prospect, naturally, that made Maggie “very distraught,” according to a mutual friend, and was bound to cause more and more friction as his departure date approached. Already Roth was contriving to make a more permanent escape. Unknown to Maggie, he’d applied for a creative-writing fellowship at Stanford for the fall; if that fell through, he hoped to sell Goodbye, Columbus to Esquire and thus have enough money to stay in Europe until February 1959 or so, whereupon he’d return to Chicago and teach. And what of Maggie? As Roth recalled, he’d made her “furious” by floating an idea to live in New York once he returned from Europe; then, a week or so later, Maggie decided to follow him there: “What was bizarre was that her children had just moved to [the suburbs of] Chicago from Texas,” said Roth. “She would be able to see them regularly now—and so she was going to go to New York.” At the time, however, Roth’s own New York plans appear to have been a smoke screen; as he confided to Gene Lichtenstein, he himself had suggested that Maggie move to the city and “pave the way” for him, when in fact he was hoping to end up in Palo Alto or stay in Europe (and eventually return to a Maggie-less Chicago). He implored Lichtenstein to arrange some kind of editorial job for Maggie at Esquire, and meanwhile, too, he set up interviews for her at Commentary, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. “Maggie saw a lot of people and was well received in all quarters, though she got no promise of work,” Roth reported after they returned from New York in late March, while Maggie confided to her journal that the city had inspired “a strange kind of terror. . . . I wanted to take refuge with someone and, of course, the someone is Philip. How terrible this longing for a mate is.”
For Roth, the trip was an unequivocal triumph. Since “Aaron Gold” had appeared in the Foley book, he’d had an agent of sorts, a genteel Princeton man named Joe McCrindle who liked taking long trips abroad. Roth wanted an agent who stayed in New York and focused on her clients, and Lichtenstein sent him to a friend, Candida Donadio, a hungry new employee of the Herb Jaffe Agency; within a few years the motherly, chain-smoking Donadio would command a stellar client list including John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Mario Puzo, Thomas Pynchon, and Roth, whom she promised, that spring, to find better-paying commercial markets for his short work and get him a good advance for a novel. Best of all, he had a festive lunch with George Plimpton at the latter’s East Seventy-second Street town house, where Roth also met Plimpton’s Paris Review colleagues Bob Silvers, Blair Fuller, and their friend Joan Dillon (daughter of Douglas Dillon, later secretary of the treasury under John F. Kennedy), who lived mostly in Paris and asked Roth to look her up when he came over. Roth hit it off all around: Silvers and Fuller became longtime friends, and Roth would always be smitten by the “worldly and glamorous and gracious” Plimpton. “Oh boy! How’re ya, boy?” he greeted Roth, wringing the young man’s hand and applauding his work in that ebullient mid-Atlantic accent (“I think from George you might have known how Henry James talked”). Roth felt like Augie March—“Look at me, going everywhere!”—and that night he phoned Tom and Jacquie Rogers and said as much.
Practically the day he returned to Chicago he got a letter from Fuller, who spoke for everyone when he said how sorry he was Roth hadn’t submitted a manuscript for their Aga Khan Prize (five hundred dollars), given to the best Paris Review story of the year; he’d missed the deadline, March 1, but if he was interested . . .? Three weeks later Fuller acknowledged receipt of “Epstein,” which was now among “six or seven” finalists for the prize. Roth had written a draft of the story back in June 1957, but it had taken a long time to get the tone right. “It is the first time I’ve written a story with sex scenes,¶ and it was a delight, but I don’t know if a success,” he wrote the Maurers. Solotaroff, for one, was “put off by all the ugly physical detail”—the shmutz (dirt, filth), in short. “The shmutz is the story!” Roth snapped.
Indeed, Roth had decided (for the first but hardly last time) that shmutz, the franker the better, was the funniest and truest way to account for certain basic human failings, such as an aging, hardworking Jewish man’s wish to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh at least once more—that is, with a woman other than his wife, Goldie, whom he “watched as she dropped her white nightdress over her head, over the breasts which had funneled down to her middle, over the behind like a bellows, the thighs and calves veined blue like a roadmap. . . . The nipples were dragged down like a cow’s, long as his little finger. He rolled back to his own side [of the bed].” That was the sort of thing that bothered Solotaroff, but the ravages of time are to the point: Epstein remembers when his twenty-three-year-old daughter was a “little pink-skinned baby” instead of a pimply woman with ankles “thick as logs,” romantically entangled with a “chinless, lazy smart aleck whose living was earned singing folk songs in a saloon”—hardly a suitable heir for Epstein Paper Bag Company, which the poor man has built from the ground. In any case, the consequences of Epstein’s unchivalrous thoughts are not lightly punished; after a three-week lark on the beach with a merry widow, he notices a telltale sore that he prays is a sand rash or something he got “from the toilet seat,” until he finally breaks down and delivers a marvelous cri de coeur: “When they start taking things away from you, you reach out, you grab—maybe like a pig even, but you grab. And right, wrong, who knows! With tears in your eyes, who can see the difference!” Finally his heart bursts with remorse, and as he’s loaded into an ambulance a doctor glances under the blanket and assures Goldie that the sore, at least, is simply an “irritation.” (The nature of that sore, as Plimpton remembered, was “the only editorial help” he ever gave Roth—this while preparing the Aga Khan Prize–winning story for publication in the Summer 1958 issue: “It was clear Philip didn’t know the first thing about what syphilis looked like. I had to call him up and straighten him out on his venereal symptoms.”)
“Maggie and I must confuse hell out of you—or I must,” Roth wrote the Maurers on April 10. “But we are back being Friends Again, or we are the most enjoyable people we know, and the inevitable end we’re just ignoring, etc etc.” Norman Mailer was coming to campus that month as the latest writer to visit Stern’s class, and Maggie and Roth decided to give a party “for just about everybody we knew in Hyde Park” and asked Stern to invite his celebrated guest. Once again Roth made a point of sitting quietly in back of the class while Mailer held forth, and Stern told him afterward that Mailer had particularly inquired about him and remarked, “It’s those silent guys you have to watch out for.” At the party, however, Mailer showed up with a glamorous local painter, June Leaf, and he and Roth had “a brief easygoing conversation” about how much Roth admired The Naked and the Dead. The party was a big success in every way—“all of bohemian Chicago was there”—and Roth was impressed by how well Maggie acquitted herself as hostess.
It would prove the latest Last Hurrah for the two. Roth was leaving Chicago in May, and Maggie was even more relentless than expected in letting him know her displeasure. Always—and rather shrewdly, from a tactical perspective—she made a point of impugning his moral and emotional stability. His abandonment of her was “wicked” and “irresponsible,” and again (as before when he’d tried to end things) she declared him “unable to love” and urged him to see a psychiatrist. “She also told me that the reason I couldn’t stay with one woman was not because I was an exuberant, libidinous young man in his twenties but because I was ‘a latent homosexual,’ ” Roth recalled. “That pseudo-Freudian label was used very freely in those years about young men who . . . might not want to marry the women who might want to marry them.” “It makes me angry to think I had so much to give and it actually was so satisfying to us both and still Philip rejects,” Maggie wrote in her journal. “How stupid he is.”
Not without cause, Roth felt sheepish about enticing her to move to New York and did his best to make sure she at least had gainful employment once she got there. As luck would have it, Lichtenstein was taking a sabbatical from Esquire that created a temporary opening for a slush-pile reader, and at Roth’s urging he got his boss, Rust Hills, to hire Maggie. “A very dear friend of mine has just come to New York,” Roth presently wrote Bob Silvers and others. “Her name is Margaret [Miller] and she is a totally charming woman. I suspect she’s going to be lonely for a while and anxious to meet people.” By then he and Maggie had parted on ostensibly friendly terms; she’d asked for his itinerary in Europe so she could write him, and hoped he would write her back. Roth was left with an impression of Maggie at her best and was far from alone, later, in wondering at the unusual duality of her nature. “I really feel like one born without one of the senses but it’s really that I have no conscience,” she’d written in her journal that April. “I have the mind to reason what is right and wrong but I have no moral repugnance to keep me from anything but I have [a] huge amount of self pity where my wickedness keeps me from having the good things that life gives to good girls.”