CHAPTER
Eighteen
LOOKING BACK, LUCY WARNER FOUND IT HARD TO believe that she’d ever seriously considered Roth’s proposal to run away to her family house in Maine. Her mother was there, for one thing, and the woman had taken a very dim view of Lucy’s hasty marriage and divorce the year before. Still, despite an almost abject wish to regain her mother’s approval, Warner might have run away with Roth to somewhere if he hadn’t expressed a curious concern about becoming too attracted to his stepdaughter as “she got a little older.” “That was an alarm bell for me,” Warner remembered.
Roth was devastated when she told him, toward the end of May, that she couldn’t go to Maine (or wherever) with him after all. In her affidavit the following year, Maggie would claim that their separation around this time had been temporary—he’d planned to rejoin her later that summer on Cape Cod—and attributed their problems to “his emotional state prior to the publication of Letting Go.” This, of course, was a distortion, but plausible up to a point. “Phil, I know you are going through a bad time now,” his editor, Joe Fox, had written him on April 24. “I don’t need to tell you that every author goes through this torture in the month or two months before publication; you know that anyway and it doesn’t help.” Fox quipped that he should work on his backhand and “listen closely to whatever Maggie says,” but of course Roth could hardly bear the thought of his wife, still less now that Lucy was fading from the picture. “He snarls and glowers,” Maggie wrote in her journal, “I ‘drive him crazy.’ It seems hopeless.”
As the summer holiday began, they put Helen on a train to Chicago without discussing the separation with her; Maggie figured they’d be reunited in time for Helen’s arrival in Wellfleet on July 19, but for now Roth was staying in Iowa while Maggie drove east on June 7. Alone in the big rental house on Cape Cod, she puzzled over their estrangement in her journal. Though not imperceptive in other respects, she seemed blind to the main cause of her husband’s dark mood: “[Philip] understands and discerns so much and really feels so little. . . . I never feel really really loved, only ‘given to,’ and I’m never allowed to love Philip in the emotional, physical way that I feel most naturally. It’s quite terrible. Somehow [italics added] Philip has a deep hostile feeling for me and when face to face the emotion I sense is hatred.” Meanwhile Bob Baker was startled by the news that his friends’ marriage was effectively over (“I don’t see that I can go back to Maggie,” Roth wrote him on June 9, “without, finally, our really destroying one another”); so fond were Bob and Ida of the Roths—Maggie too—that they’d named their second and third children Philip and Margaret. Their primary loyalty was to Philip, however, and they urged him to come to Oregon and stay as long as he liked, the way he’d almost done three years ago, when he considered fleeing Maggie rather than marrying her.
In the end, though, he couldn’t bring himself to board the airplane in Cedar Rapids. His fear of flying flared up amid general anxiety, and he phoned his brother instead and asked if he could stay awhile in Stuy Town; Sandy told him to come ahead—Trudy and the boys were summering on Fire Island, so Philip would have the place to himself much of the time. Finally he made his excuses to Bob Baker, who didn’t like the way his friend sounded. “The black fact is that we are concerned about his mental health,” Baker wrote Solotaroff afterward, begging him to keep an eye on Roth in New York and let them know how he was doing. “We love the big lug and this is pretty important to us . . . we haven’t had anyone to turn to for information and—as you’ll understand—we haven’t wanted to press Phil.”
The train trip to New York was an unpromising start to single life, as Roth stopped at a newsstand in Chicago to read the first major reviews of Letting Go in Time and Newsweek. He remembered staggering back to a bench as the words sank in. Two months before, he’d noted his growing dread that the novel to which he’d given so much would be dismissed as “a sad book,” among other things, and here it was in black and white. “Melancholy Journey” was the title of the Newsweek review, whose author described Gabe Wallach as “a selfish, irresolute kvetch,” and likened Roth’s “carefully brilliant set-pieces” to “gaudy depots on the Trans-Siberian Railway.” The Time review (“The Grey Plague”) was a little more sympathetic, suggesting that writers should “solve the second-book problem the way architects solve the 13th-floor problem”—that is, by skipping from the first book to the third.
Sandy was getting ready for a party when Philip arrived that evening; noticing his brother’s frayed nerves, Sandy gave him a phone number where he could be reached. Philip had taken a shower and made a sandwich when the phone rang: Maggie. Though he hadn’t told her his whereabouts, she’d speculated in her journal that he wouldn’t be able to board a plane to Oregon (a likely destination, as she well knew), and hence she was “betting on New York” where, she wrote, he could “have a talk with Maxine to see if his old passion is recreated. He’ll also be able to see people and talk about his book.” She moreover recorded the fact that she was very drunk by the time she finally got hold of the fugitive. Shouting, she told him that if he didn’t stop this nonsense and come to Wellfleet she’d ruin his life, soaking him for alimony just like Marty Greenberg’s first wife and denouncing him as a cheating philanderer to whosoever would listen. Afterward Roth tried calming himself with a walk, but when he returned to the apartment he began to shake and was wracked by fits of vomiting and diarrhea; finally he phoned Sandy, who came home immediately. That night Philip belatedly told his brother the whole lurid saga—from the urine ruse to the suicide-attempt-cum-confession back in January—whereupon Sandy insisted on phoning his old psychiatrist, Hans Kleinschmidt, who agreed to pencil in Sandy’s celebrated brother the very next day.
Sandy had given the analyst an earful over the years about how manipulative—alternately suffocating and severe—his mother had been when he was a boy, before she’d effectively jilted him in favor of Philip. “Does your wife remind you of your mother?” was Kleinschmidt’s first question for the latter, who remembered thinking, “Oh god, not the clichés right off.” No, Philip replied—again and again, over the years—the two women could hardly be more dissimilar . . . yet Kleinschmidt would never really waver in his conviction that Bess Roth was the virtual embodiment of the “phallic mother figure.”
Kleinschmidt was a fascinating figure in his own right. An expert in abstract expressionism (Kandinsky in particular), he’d actually met Philip a few years earlier in Amagansett, where he too liked to summer along with his fellow analysts and their painter-patients. A direct disciple of Freud, Kleinschmidt had grown up in Berlin and attended medical school at the University of Freiburg, finishing in Italy after fleeing the Nazis in 1933, and finally immigrating to the States. As Adam Gopnik would memorably describe him (“Max Grosskurth”) in a New Yorker piece published eighteen months after Kleinschmidt’s death in 1997—a portrait Roth considered “perfect”—Kleinschmidt was “tall, commanding, humorless,” something of a dandy who affected “large, blooming shirts, dark suits, heavy handmade shoes, club ties.” His specialty was creative people (“I sometimes half expected him to put up autographed glossies around the office,” Gopnik wrote, “like the ones on the wall at the Stage Deli”), whom he invariably determined were narcissistic to some greater or lesser degree, a verdict he asserted with an authoritative baritone “uncannily like Henry Kissinger’s.”
During their first session, Roth discussed what would become “the master theme” of his first year of analysis: his almost homicidal rage over Maggie’s urine fraud, not to say bafflement at how easily she’d bamboozled him. For Kleinschmidt, the young novelist (or “successful Southern playwright,” as he’d style Roth in his 1967 paper, “The Angry Act”) was an intriguing instance of “the interplay of narcissism and aggression” in an oedipally conflicted patient. “There’s your narcissism again!” was Kleinschmidt’s favorite catch-phrase vis-à-vis Roth, along with “You have to stand up for yourself!” “But when I do it,” Roth would reply, “you say it’s my narcissism.” Nevertheless Roth stuck with the analyst, on and off, for the next three decades; Kleinschmidt was a cultured and intelligent man of the world, after all, and his advice sometimes savored of wisdom, at least when he dispensed with “the psychoanalytic shit,” as Roth always considered it. Then, too, Roth needed to confide in somebody, and he figured Kleinschmidt’s hourly rates were worth it if he could speak freely without fear of gossip—a mistaken assumption, or so Gopnik learned “after a couple of disconcerting weeks of telling [his] troubles to a sleeping therapist”; gossip, it turned out, was the only surefire way of reviving the man.
“And so my mother’s relationship with my father reminds me [says Gopnik to “Grosskurth”]—well, in certain ways it reminds me of what people have been saying about Philip Roth’s divorce from Claire Bloom” . . .
Instantly, his head would jerk straight up, his eyes open, and he would shake himself all over like a Lab coming out of the water. “Yes, what are they saying about this divorce?” he would demand.
ABOUT A WEEK AFTER his arrival in New York, Roth visited the Styrons at their home in Roxbury, Connecticut, in rustic Litchfield County. Roth informed the couple of his separation from Maggie and asked if he could rent Bill’s two-room studio while they spent the summer, as ever, on Martha’s Vineyard; they insisted he take the studio for free, and even let him use an extra car. Roth had never lived in the countryside and was enchanted by the nearby swimming pond, the long vistas of farmland and wooded ridges, the little general store, and even a famous playwright, Arthur Miller, who stopped by with his wife, the photographer Inge Morath, to introduce themselves at the Styrons’ urging.
By then Lucy Warner had also returned to the East and was visiting her brother in Newport, Rhode Island, where he was stationed with the navy—this after an unhappy meeting with Roth at his brother’s apartment in New York, the day after the drunken Maggie had threatened to leave him as destitute as Marty Greenberg. Hardly a model of solidity herself at the time, Warner was spooked by Roth’s panicky behavior and bolted on the pretext of having a doctor’s appointment. A couple of weeks later Roth phoned her from Connecticut, and, wishing to make amends, she agreed to take a bus to nearby Southbury. For a few days they had a pleasant visit, going on long walks and sleeping together, until one night Maggie called while they were broiling steaks. For the next hour or more, Roth and his wife yelled at each other with mounting hysteria while Warner waited outside and the steaks turned to shoe leather. The next day she left for Maine, though not before saying (or so she vaguely remembered), à la Karen Oakes in My Life as a Man, “I can’t save you, Philip. I’m only twenty-two years old.”
Pinned over Styron’s desk was a Flaubert maxim that would become important to Roth too: “Be orderly and regular in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild and original in your work.” Settling down to the most orderly routine he could manage, Roth began writing a play, 1957: The Taming of the Id. The setting is the Upper West Side basement apartment of an up-and-coming actor, Lawrence (“Mendy”) Mendel, whose sharp-tongued and rather plain girlfriend, Ann, has just arrived by train bearing most of her worldly possessions. “ ‘Oh, Mr. Mendel,’ ” she mimics a girl at the station, “ ‘I go to Bryn Mawr and I saw you in The Seagull.’ ” Despite a wistful manqué streak (“I ought to take up a musical instrument”), Ann is all too aware of her deficiencies next to her tall, talented, good-looking boyfriend, and when he seems on the verge of leaving her—as he has once before, albeit guiltily, after she agreed to get an abortion—she claims to be pregnant a second time, and proves it by furtively obtaining urine from an “obviously pregnant” Puerto Rican woman. After much righteous haranguing from Ann, Mendy admits his hopeless sexual inconstancy and general unworthiness: “I stink. I’m a monster of me. Greedy! Selfish. Me me me me. Do you think I’m blind to myself? I should be crawling on my belly for things you don’t even know about.” In the end he agrees to marry her, despite every manifest inclination to the contrary.
Roth sent the script to his friend Howard Stein, the drama professor, who also happened to be aware of the underlying facts. Stein had admired A Coffin in Egypt, Roth’s teleplay, but was unsparing about this far more personal effort, which he described as “terribly dull, bad drama, bad writing, dull self-obsessed analysis, and much much more.” Roth would continue to struggle with the material—a mélange of Maggietrauma that would need to marinate a lot longer before he knew what to do with it all, eventually using the righteous Ann-like girlfriend in When She Was Good, the young man’s priapism in Portnoy’s Complaint, and the crucial urine ruse (intended for both of these earlier novels) in My Life as a Man.
“This has been the worst month of my life,” he wrote Baker on July 12, and it wasn’t liable to get better now that he’d agreed to visit his angry wife in Wellfleet to coincide with Helen’s arrival. Roth and Maggie had made up “some lie” about his having to work on a movie for much of the summer, and meanwhile they’d disposed of Ronald by signing him up for a six-week bicycle trip around New England for young teenagers; his touring group had spent a single night in Wellfleet, camping on the lawn of the Roths’ rental house. Other visitors during Roth’s brief stay on the Cape were his old Weequahic friend Stu Lehman and his wife, Bette, who came for a weekend and were struck by how “disturbed” Helen seemed amid the palpable strife between her mother and stepfather. The softhearted Lehmans got up early that Sunday morning and drove the girl to Provincetown, where they let her pick out a treasure for her tchotchke shelf.
In her 1963 affidavit Maggie claimed to have been in a state of “utter amazement” when Roth saw fit to leave Wellfleet after only a few days; more amazing still, he’d canceled their rental house in Princeton, as she learned when she called the owner a few days prior to their scheduled arrival. She demanded an explanation from the miscreant, and Roth “replied rather vaguely” that he’d assumed she and Helen would be returning to New York, where Maggie could find a job. “Since we had had no prior discussions along these lines and since I wanted our marriage to continue despite his severe emotional problems,” Maggie testified, “I can in retrospect only surmise that this was his first attempt at abandonment, which he reconsidered.” “My wife’s frequent statements that she could not go on without me helped me to this conclusion,” Roth explained to the court of his decision to give marriage another try, “for I felt genuinely sorry for this neurotic woman”—or, as he put it a few decades later, “I had essentially collapsed in the face of her threats.”
SOLOTAROFF REPORTED to Baker that he’d found their friend “upset about the reception of [Letting Go] in some deep, baffled way,” and of course chastened by life as a whole. Roth had a long way to fall from the sky-high expectations of Goodbye, Columbus, though really things might have been a lot worse. Prepublication excerpts of his novel had appeared in three major magazines—Esquire, Harper’s, and Mademoiselle—and the first printing of twenty thousand had sold out in a week. And yet: “None of the jack-offs who reviewed it read it,” Roth complained to Baker, “or if they did, they did with blinders, and it’s really, to me, a little sickening and disappointing—but why should it be? Let me tell you, you write for yourself. That comes home to me especially now. It’s just a god damn shame.”
In fact, the book was widely and often thoughtfully reviewed, but with a pervasive sense of disappointment to be sure. Orville Prescott, in the daily New York Times, deplored its unwieldy length and occasional nastiness (“Mr. Roth is still so young he wants to shock”), but came to the heartening conclusion that Roth was “probably the most talented novelist under 30 in America.” The headline of the Sunday Times review by Arthur Mizener—BUMBLERS IN A WORLD OF THEIR OWN—pointed to a common complaint among critics that seemed to derive from Roth’s own remarks in “Writing American Fiction,” or anyway a misreading thereof. Mizener mentioned two of the writers, Bellow and Styron, whom Roth had allegedly rebuked for averting their eyes from a realistic appraisal of the big public scene, and accused Roth of the same tendency—as if all three “had spent more of their lives with the Paris Review crowd or in Iowa City or some similar ‘creative writing’ center than was good for them as writers.” Bellow also seemed familiar with “Writing American Fiction” and had likely found something amiss in Roth’s remarks about the “wholly imagined” (versus realistic) world of Henderson the Rain King. “A recent novel like Philip Roth’s Letting Go is a consummate example of this,” he wrote in Encounter, referring to a trend in fiction that reflected the “unearned bitterness” of “the young American writer,” who merely “defends his sensibility” rather than attacking “power and injustice” for some greater good. “Roth’s hero clings to the hope of self-knowledge and personal improvement, and he concludes that with all his faults, he loves himself still. His inner life, if it may be called that, is a rather feeble thing of a few watts.”
In Letting Go and various works to come, Roth tried puzzling out the question of why he’d thrown away the best years of his youth for the sake of a conventional idea of goodness. “All that moral precociousness and striving had made me a success in my budding literary career and a stupid, burdened failure in my private life,” he said of the quandary that would persist, in some form, throughout much of his life. For now: Why the hurry to tame the id, to relinquish one’s reckless freedom and assume the dull burdens of adulthood? From the vantage point of the sixties and beyond, Roth would view himself as a product of his era, when young men were taught to value themselves in proportion to the number of crippling obligations—marriage, children, career—they were willing to assume. And yet his particular case was more bewildering than most. Growing up he’d always considered himself a decent, responsible young man with compassion for the underdog, and certainly his mentors at Bucknell and elsewhere were apt to agree; suddenly, however, in his twenties, he was beset by adversaries who accused him of being wicked and irresponsible and deceitful, eminently deserving of the keenest sense of guilt. No wonder he would become so fascinated by Kafka in his thirties.
Letting Go is rightly dedicated to Maggie, who introduced the sprightly young author of Goodbye, Columbus to the darkness of an adult life gone irrevocably awry. Roth confected a sympathetic surrogate in the person of Martha Reganhart, a game divorcée who supports her two children as a waitress and takes college courses while seeming to bear up with a kind of sassy good cheer (“What a dumb, silly, impossible bitch” is one of her first two utterances in Gabe Wallach’s hearing). Gabe finds the woman attractive—“admirable”—in a superficial way but soon finds himself distressingly overcommitted to a life whose squalor is barely held at bay. Martha’s medicine chest is a “square foot of chaos,” and her maternal solicitude dissembles a longing to abolish the last few years of her life and start over with a clean, childless slate. Gabe, for all the sporadic exertions of his “Jamesian” conscience, soon realizes he doesn’t care enough for this blowzy woman to stomach her medicine cabinet or her exasperating children (“I am not his father, he is not my son,” he decides of little Markie), while she, in turn, furiously lets him know he’s forfeited her good opinion and sexual favors: “Don’t ever try to get me in bed again, you!” And still Gabe longs to consider himself “an educated man, a decent man”—all the more for having failed Martha—and hence meddles high-mindedly in the lives of his friends Paul and Libby Herz, whom he helps adopt a child. The wreckage mounts as Gabe takes it upon himself to deal with the birth mother’s cretinous husband, who extorts more and more money from Gabe while refusing to sign a letter giving up his parental rights, until at last Gabe almost loses both his mind and the baby. What he gains in the way of self-awareness or moral redemption is left very much in doubt.
As Roth would explain the ending of his first novel a few years later, he wanted Gabe (Paul Herz too) to come up against something “unresolvable”—something that no amount of education and decency would fix. “There’s a deep innocence in these people,” he said, “a deep innocence about the nature of evil. They don’t expect it should really be there. That’s what makes them think that if they hurl themselves against the wall they’ll finally break it down.” They would do well to learn an elusive virtue suggested by the book’s title—detachment, self-preservation—lest they make the same mistake as Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. Mulling the lesson of Archer’s ghastly marriage to Gilbert Osmond, Gabe reflects, “Terrible struggles go on in the heart, to which the heart itself will not admit, when pity is mistaken for love.” Paul Herz likewise commits himself to a miserable marriage out of pity, a leaden sense of duty, and blunders away at it despite the counsel of his raffish Uncle Asher—a bachelor artist (like Roth’s Uncle Mickey) who chooses to live in a shabby loft above a Third Avenue bar in exchange for sweet freedom. “Nobody owes nobody nothing,” Asher repeatedly reminds his unhappy nephew.
Minor characters such as Asher, and the funny if often digressive scenes they animate, are the most appealing parts of Letting Go. Asher snoozes in peaceful apathy while his mistress prattles at Paul, and later one of Paul’s ex-girlfriends serves him a sophisticated cup of espresso while discussing Marjorie Morningstar in an expertly rendered Brooklyn accent. Gabe’s father gives a lovingly evoked slideshow of his European travels for friends (including his “diabetic accountant” and “Henny Sokoloff, widower and diamond king”), while explaining his new fiancée’s conspicuous tippling to his son: “She’s had a lot of tragedy in her life. One sunny day she goes outside her place in South Orange and her husband is being driven all over the lawn in their power mower. He’s dead in his seat. It was a horrible thing.”
Otherwise we’re left to the “fine amenities [and] brave decisions” for which the novel’s guiding spirit, Henry James, is celebrated on a London plaque—in the case of Letting Go, these amount to more than six hundred pages of agonizing vacillation, renunciation, and occasional domestic tumult, blessedly mitigated by the odd bit of shtick. “Line by line the writing is fine,” Granville Hicks justly remarked in the Saturday Review, “but that does not save long stretches from being unpardonably dull and quite superfluous.”
It bears repeating, though, that the novel’s reception was hardly the “god damn shame” its author would have it be. Reviewers commended its better qualities and remained hopeful that Roth would one day live up to the grand promise of Goodbye, Columbus; meanwhile his second book sold almost 34,000 copies in hardcover, lingering around the lower rungs of the best-seller lists throughout much of that long summer. Given his gaining acclaim, Roth was named a Seventeen magazine “VIP,” in which capacity he composed a no-nonsense piece of advice (“They Won’t Make You Normal”) about reading novels (“and the writing of them, if you are feeling game”): “Novels do not pussyfoot around,” Roth wrote. “They can leave you sulky, angry, fearful and desperate.”* As for his own first novel, its relative failure would leave Roth sulky for years to come—until, toward the end of a long career, his canonical status assured, he was able to describe it as “so solemn and morally in earnest that it might have been taken to be my voluminous application for a novitiate in the Society of Jesuits.” That said, Roth would always look pensive whenever someone said hard words about Letting Go, as if the novel were a faded but beloved old girlfriend whom he hated for anyone but himself to mock.
FOR A WHILE the Roths lived again as a family at 232 Bayard Lane, Princeton. As the university’s twenty-nine-year-old writer in residence, Roth made exactly twice his salary at Iowa, $11,000, while teaching essentially the same two courses: a writing course that met once a week for two hours, and a fiction seminar (Form and Values in Fiction) for which Roth taught his twelve undergraduate men (before the days of coeducation at Princeton) the shorter masterpieces of Mann, Conrad, Tolstoy, and Bellow. “I tried to make them attend carefully and exactly to the surface of the work, and to try to lead them away from ‘deep’ reading that was only an excuse for not reading,” Roth explained in 1964 (though he might have said as much at any time).
Roth was charmed by the town, though he found no soulmates among his fellow faculty members, at least during those first months when he was, in any case, conversationally depleted by his thrice-weekly sessions with Kleinschmidt in New York. The novelist and translator Edmund “Mike” Keeley had been at the American Academy during Roth’s time in Rome and was a great admirer of Goodbye, Columbus; he’d paved the way for Roth’s appointment, and the two liked each other and occasionally socialized with other couples. Perhaps Roth’s favorite of their circle was the photographer Naomi Savage, who’d studied with her uncle Man Ray in California and took Roth’s author photo for the paperback edition of Letting Go.† She also took an evocative, soft-focus portrait of Maggie that Roth dearly wished he could use, later, for the jacket of When She Was Good, about the doomed virago Lucy Nelson; since he and Maggie were deadly enemies by then, Roth had to settle instead for Savage’s photograph of another goyish blonde, Betty Fussell, the wife of his Princeton colleague Paul. Betty remembered Roth as “aloof” and even “Puritan” by the standards of their rather louche literary set‡—an impression belied by Maggie’s journal entry the day after that year’s New Year’s Eve party: “Philip was very gay and full of tricks. He’s rather attracted to Betty Fussell.”
Roth agreed he was somewhat aloof at Princeton—disinclined to discuss his hellish home life, and also sensing a vague distance on the part of colleagues. “Not an easy town for a hotshot young Jew writer to tumble through in those days,” he explained. Happily he soon began a lifelong friendship with one of the very few Jews—and a “Jew-y Jew” too, as Roth liked to say, a big slovenly cigar-smoking spritzer—on the faculty: Melvin Tumin, an eminent sociologist and expert on segregation, who’d directed the Mayor’s Commission on Race Relations in Detroit before heading to Princeton in 1947. Hardly content to be the first Jew in the Social Science Department (and perhaps one of four Jewish professors period), Tumin raised a ruckus over the sacrosanct, Jew-barring eating clubs, earning the lasting enmity of his goy colleagues, including President Robert Goheen. Despite a stellar publishing record and reputation as a witty and brilliant (if eccentric and uncompromising) teacher, Tumin remained an associate professor for decades, until at last it became simply too embarrassing not to promote him.
Tumin had been delighted to learn that the young author of Goodbye, Columbus was coming to Princeton: another Jew, and another Newark Jew to boot. The two hit it off over lunch and were like brothers thereafter—Tumin the older, more pedantic brother, but always loving and protective. As Roth remarked in his eulogy, “Mine became another life that Mel took it upon himself to assist and oversee as secretary of health, education, and welfare.”
Among faculty friends, Tumin alone had an inkling of the “wild and wooly time” being had by the residents of 232 Bayard Lane. “Our menage is once more intact and all is more or less well,” Maggie circumspectly reported to a friend in November. “The rub is that we are undertaking a monumental therapy program (all three of us!).” This was true. Maggie was in analysis with Samuel Guttman, editor of the standard English concordance to Freud’s writings and director of the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies at Princeton. Helen was seeing Shirley Van Ferney, who decided her young charge was too distracted by domestic chaos to write a report for school, and so wrote it for her: “I had to read it in front of my class and I couldn’t,” Helen remembered. “There was too much leakage of [Van Ferney’s] life into my life, and it left me feeling incredibly empty and lost.” Roth, however, considered all that therapy to be money well spent—six hundred and fifty 1962 dollars a month for the three of them—if it helped mitigate an atmosphere that remained on the fraught side. “[W]hat the end will be I don’t know,” he wrote Baker. “But just recently, I’ve begun to feel as though the pieces had been picked up, and some of the major ones were back in place—hanging by wires and tape perhaps—and I suppose that’s why I can at long last write to you.”
This would prove prematurely optimistic. The court would determine, in 1964, that the defendant, Philip Roth, “abandoned the plaintiff on March 1, 1963, without cause or justification therefor”—a conclusion with which the defendant was apt to differ. In Princeton he’d lasted another six months as Maggie’s husband all but entirely for the sake of Helen, who was “becoming a very special person,” he wrote Baker, despite the considerable odds against her. “She is quite beautiful and adult, though she performs badly in school—not that she wants to—because she reads so badly, and her life is going to be founded on other things than books. But on beautiful and passionate things, I hope.” Helen appeared to be aiming for a passionate life: she and a friend were taking ballet classes, and when Roth came home from the office of an afternoon, the two girls would favor him with a dance in the living room, which usually ended with the leotarded Helen flopping into his lap. “I thought ‘Oh boy, oh boy,’ ” said Roth. “ ‘I’m gonna get killed and these two kids are gonna get killed too.’ ”
It was no idle concern. More and more, Maggie’s anger encompassed both husband and daughter; she accused Helen of having “an evil streak” and would sometimes shake and slap her, telling Roth to mind his own business when he tried to interfere. And of course her perception of the girl’s flirtatiousness was hardly unwarranted. “If you ever fuck my daughter, I’ll drive a knife right down into your heart” had become a favorite refrain, uttered with such conviction one night that Roth waited, one eye open, for his wife to fall asleep, then stole into the kitchen and hid all the knives. “Where’s a knife?” Helen called the next morning, in a hurry for school and wanting to eat a grapefruit. Roth decided that retrieving the stepladder and removing a knife from the top of the kitchen cabinet would be too conspicuous. “I advised her to eat it with her hands,” he wrote Baker the following year, “and that, more or less, is how we all survived.”
If that were not sufficient “cause or justification” for Roth’s final departure—as the court would determine—an argument about the pronunciation of “orange” persuaded Roth himself that it was time to go. “This is pure Ionesco,” he reminisced. He’d said AH-range, Maggie said OH-range, and Roth suggested they look it up in the dictionary; rather than call the whole thing off, Maggie erupted, “Why do you say I’m wrong all the time?!”—then removed a sandal with a hard cork heel, walked to his side of the table, and whacked him in the triceps as hard as she could. Helen began to scream. Without a word Roth went upstairs and packed his toilet kit, then left the house and took a room at the Nassau Inn. Realizing he had nothing to read, he walked to a bookstore on Nassau Street and bought a copy of Ushant, by Conrad Aiken.
After a few days Roth moved to a dark room with an air-shaft view at the Warwick Hotel (reduced rates for academics) on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan. By then Maggie affected to find the whole thing silly, and expected Roth to return once he got over his “temper tantrum.” When almost two months had passed, she went to see Kleinschmidt and was gently disabused. As she recorded in her journal on April 29, 1963:
[Kleinschmidt] said I had made one serious mistake: In confessing to Philip. I realize this too. He said he thinks he knows what course Philip would take if we were to remain married and I understood him to mean that he would be unfaithful and deserting constantly. K. has rather settled theories about the psyche and neurosis of the artist and it’s hard to know whether he’s right or not. . . . K.’s feeling is that it’s impossible to be married to an actor or writer happily, that in other words “they’re all alike.” He gave Norman Mailer and J. Baldwin as examples, but is Philip really like them?
This is the only entry in Maggie’s journal that alludes to the urine fraud.