CHAPTER
Twenty-Two
RANDOM HOUSE EXPRESSED ITS CONFIDENCE IN WHEN She Was Good with a lucrative advance: $102,000, to be doled out to Roth in $17,000 yearly increments lest his wife get ideas about raising her alimony. Roth, too, was satisfied with his work, and indeed would always consider it the best among his early novels. As he wrote the Gibberds, “It took me close to four years to write it, much of the time spent howling with pain—but I’m pleased with it now, and Random House is doing a first printing of 25,000. Which is a lot.”
Roth prided himself on his objective—“pitiless,” as Flaubert would have it—characterization of Lucy Nelson: “There is no venom in the portrait,” he said, “even though it was based on my worst enemy.” Which is not to say Lucy is sympathetic so much as comprehensible—the result of much sober reflection on Roth’s part as to the source of his wife’s rage toward the men in her life, beginning with her father. That even a person like Maggie is born innocent and well meaning is nicely suggested in the novel’s early pages, as Lucy’s grandfather, Daddy Will, visits her grave and remembers “the tiny, spirited, golden-haired child that Lucy had been—how lively, bright, and sweet.” The teenage Lucy vows to follow “Saint Teresa’s little way of spiritual childhood,” until the day her drunken father upends a pan of water in which her long-suffering mother is “soaking her beautiful, frail feet”; Lucy calls on Saint Teresa to intervene but her prayer is unanswered, whereupon she decides she can’t stand Teresa’s “suffering little guts” and calls the police instead. All she wants is an ordinary life without the torments of a drunken father, but her mother is too weak and her grandfather too kindhearted, so it falls to Lucy to put the man in jail. Henceforth she won’t let men get away with shirking their duty (as she sees it), and her rage grows as they fail her time and again. “Goodbye, protectors and defenders, heroes and saviors,” she thinks at last, utterly alone in the world. “You are no longer needed, you are no longer wanted—alas, you have been revealed for what you are. Farewell, farewell, philanderers and frauds, cowards and weaklings, cheaters and liars. Fathers and husbands, farewell!”
To be sure, Lucy’s father and husband are scarcely permitted to be other than cowards and weaklings in her righteous estimation. (Saint Lucy was one of Roth’s discarded titles, the better to highlight a sanctimony that doesn’t even spare a fellow saint.) “Stone!” her father shouts, as she stands unflinching (her finger still marking her place in a schoolbook) despite the armful of snow he heaves at her before the police take him away. Nor does she “favor him with a reply” when, later, he tries to make amends by urging her to pursue her “dream” of college rather than have Roy Bassart’s child. “I thought Roy a good name for this unkinglike boy who Lucy would do all she could to turn into a king,” said Roth of Lucy’s determination to spite her father, to reject the freedom she might have known outside Liberty Center (no less), by marrying “someone she secretly despised.” “If only they’d say no,” she wistfully rages. “NO, LUCY, YOU CANNOT. NO, LUCY, WE FORBID IT. But it seemed that none of them had the conviction any longer, or the endurance, to go against a choice of hers.” Far from turning Roy into a king, Lucy reduces him to an even worse booby, barely able to open his mouth except to placate her. “Twenty-two,” she thinks, “and this will be my whole life. This. This. This. This.”
Roth had meant to capture Lucy’s “desperate and heartbroken” quality, while also doing justice to the toll she takes on those “in the immediate orbit of her outrage”; suffice it to say, the latter part of this formulation receives his more zestful treatment. Toward the end of the novel Lucy is a castrating, self-pitying monster and little else. Having driven Roy away with an anathema even he won’t tolerate—“pansy”—she assures herself of his “heartless cruelty” and doubles down on her denunciations when Roy’s mother accuses her of tricking him into marriage. “But he tricked me, Alice! Tricked me to think he was a man, when he’s a mouse, a monster! A moron! He’s a pansy, that’s what your son is, the worst and weakest pansy there ever was!” This is certainly out of proportion to Roy’s shortcomings, and the reader is bound to feel an overdue sense of catharsis when Lucy is finally opposed by Roy’s Uncle Sowerby—“my idol,” as Roth admitted of the man who calls Lucy a “little ball-breaker of a bitch” to her face (“He’s not a Jew, you see,” Roth explained).
Malamud commended Roth’s narrative skill, but also noted, “Since Lucy is rendered monolithic, relentless, half-insane, impossible to like . . . I can’t include her within the compass of my feeling for the people in the book. That leaves me with pity for Whitey and his wife . . . and I felt left a little in the cold.” Fair enough. Lucy’s violent moralizing is exciting for a while, but finally becomes tiresome—Maggie without the nuances of wit or hypocrisy (“I have no conscience”). And Roth’s comedic gift is constrained by a pitiless (Flaubert) determination “to be dull with the dull”—a scheme he carries off a little too successfully. “At the age of twenty,” Roy reflects in oafish third person, “nobody had to tell him that it was high time to begin thinking about becoming a man. Because he was thinking about it, and plenty, don’t worry.” But it was precisely this aspect of his achievement that pleased Roth most—his evocation of Liberty Center in all “the terrible ordinariness of its ordinariness”—a naturalistic tour de force that palls well before the last of the book’s three hundred or so pages.
Still, Roth had worked so long and hard on his “novel without Jews” that he could scarcely bear hearing a bad word about it, and for this reason avoided a Random House sales conference that Fox had urged him to attend. Publication had been postponed from March 1967 because the Literary Guild wanted to offer the book as a selection in June, but the news hadn’t reached Vogue in time to stop an early mugging by Jean Stafford: “One feels that one has spent a long Thanksgiving day with a hinterland family whose interests, ambitions, politics, houses, automobiles, food, and tragedies are so studiously average that they should be subjects for a statistician rather than a novelist.” “I see the handwriting and I see the wall,” Roth wrote Bob Baker of this “devastatingly negative” review, “but then I’ve been seeing both for some time now, and learned I think how to take this stuff last time round. Or so it says here.”
As it happened, the stuff he’d taken last time round would in fact be very like what was coming at him this time too; how well he’d take it was another matter. Early readers among his peers, such as Malamud, had been impressed by his craftsmanship—whatever their reservations otherwise—and Roth wondered whether it was his fate to be “a writer’s writer” rather than popular (“Can’t I have both, he asked”). And certainly reviewers tended to stress, once again, Roth’s great promise and seriousness. “When She Was Good may be another disappointment, another failure,” Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote in the daily New York Times, “—but, like Letting Go, a failure in terms of the tough, admirable standards that Mr. Roth’s acute observation and solid, unadorned prose call forth and by which all his work, disappointing and not, should be judged. Which is to say that the failure was interesting—and the disappointment keen.” The key words were “failure” and “disappointment,” and while the Sunday Times reviewer, Wilfrid Sheed, was somewhat more appreciative, book buyers were unlikely to flock at the prospect of Lutheran characters who are “just like Jews only duller (a sociological insight which might just stand up).” Perhaps the only review that satisfied Roth was Raymond Rosenthal’s in The New Leader, which made the point that Roth’s decision to let his characters “talk and act for themselves” was a modernist tendency harking back to Flaubert: “With a simplicity and modesty that are in the end lethal, Roth has written the most violently satiric book about American life since . . . Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.”
“The history of my discontent,” began a ten-point letter Roth wrote to his agent, Candida Donadio, seven weeks after publication—a scathing appraisal of Random House’s work on When She Was Good, with most of the opprobrium laid on the head of Joe Fox, whose lapses included a suggestion they lower the first printing (to ten or fifteen thousand) and also refrain from sending advance galleys, a practice Fox allegedly found both expensive and “pushy.” In short, he was cheap. When Roth complained about the absence of a Times ad on publication day, Fox replied that “advertising doesn’t sell books”; when Roth mentioned that he was seeing a fair number of ads for the Random House novel Fathers, by Herbert Gold—a writer for whom Roth had very little love—Fox pointed out that Fathers had sold forty thousand copies. “Well, you can tell them this, sweetie,” Roth wrote his agent, “—they can have Herb Gold and his 40,000 copies and I’ll go where I am advertised commensurate to my reputation. This book is going to read long after Fathers, and if they are too stupid to understand that, then fuck em.”
Actually Fox was arguing for more advertising as late as September 8—three months after publication—reminding Cerf that the book was still selling over a thousand copies a week for a total, to date, of 27,589. That said, Fox added that his dinner with Roth the night before had gone “very pleasantly. . . . Neither of us discussed the fuss around advertising.” Perhaps he’d assumed that all was well; he would learn otherwise in due course.
THAT SUMMER OF 1967 Roth and Mudge were back on Martha’s Vineyard, this time renting a ramshackle cottage a short walk away from the general store in West Tisbury. The days were marred by foul weather (“rain, fog, and damp”), though the couple found pleasure in watching a family of swans gliding around the pond in their backyard. Among literary friends the talk was mainly about the Vietnam War. Both Roth and Mudge were passionately opposed—all the more since Mudge’s younger brother had recently been drafted and would soon be sent to Vietnam. Mudge got rid of her Dow Chemical stock because the company manufactured napalm and Agent Orange, and a little later she began working as a draft counselor at a Quaker peace center in the Village, where she befriended the writer and activist Grace Paley. Earlier that spring, she and Roth had gathered in Central Park for a peace march down Fifth Avenue, and afterward Roth was furious when the media grossly underestimated (as he saw it) the size of the crowd. Back at Mudge’s apartment he impulsively phoned NBC: “Put me through to the president!” he ordered the NBC operator, who doubtfully asked for the president’s name. “He’s my friend,” Roth replied. “I don’t know his name. Put me through.” Mudge laughed in the other room and Roth, abashed, hung up.
In August the Styrons gave a party for Robert Kennedy, and Jules Feiffer was approached by Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach, who proclaimed himself a fan of the left-wing cartoonist. “How can you be in an administration that’s fighting this war in Vietnam and say you are a fan of mine?” Feiffer replied, but Katzenbach insisted that he too was opposed to the war. A week later, Katzenbach gave “shit-eating testimony” (as Roth put it) before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressing unequivocal support of Johnson’s war policy. Feiffer called a meeting among their friends on the island. Some wanted to picket Katzenbach’s house, but finally they decided to take out a full-page ad in the Vineyard Gazette, for which Roth drafted a letter. “The Gut Issue” ran on August 25, headed by an italicized quote from Katzenbach’s testimony: “. . . the ‘gut issue here is whether or not the Congress supports the President in what he does . . .’ ”; the shaming letter that followed—signed by Roth, Feiffer, Styron, Hellmann, John Hersey, and other summer neighbors of Katzenbach—rejoined that the “gut issue” was whether “a civilized and humane man” such as he would “stop playing the functionary and speak out against President Johnson’s indefensible diplomacy of violence.”
And Katzenbach, it turned out, wasn’t the only civilized and humane man on the island who supported the war. In later years, John Updike would remember his first meeting with Roth as having taken place that summer on the porch of a New Yorker colleague, Bernie Taper, where he and Roth had a heated argument about Vietnam; in fact (as Roth reminded him) they’d met some eight years earlier, at the home of a Houghton editor, Jack Leggett, who lived near Updike in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The two young writers—Updike was born a year and a day before Roth—were then at the beginning of their brilliant, much compared careers, and Roth came away from Ipswich with a pleasant memory of Updike as “a kind of engaging, elongated leprechaun.” That night on Taper’s porch, however, Updike was strident in defending a man he considered a beleaguered “underdog”: LBJ. As he wrote in his memoir, Self-Consciousness, “At one point Roth, in the calm and courteous tone of one who had been through many psychiatric sessions, pointed out to me that I was the most aggressive person in the room.” That may have been so, though Roth remembered a civil degree of animation on both sides: “Because no one else I knew had John’s view of the war, it wasn’t often that I had a chance to so flagrantly exhibit my righteousness.” Updike, who wasted nothing, wrote to inform Roth in 1973 that he’d given Roth’s part of their argument to Skeeter, the black Vietnam vet in Rabbit Redux.*
Energized by his summer among (mostly) radical writers, Roth had an idea that he was eager to share with Bob Silvers, who was well connected with Noam Chomsky and other intellectuals on the left: namely, an indefinite general strike among antiwar academics that was aimed at shutting down as many universities as possible. Silvers was skeptical. He thought academics might be persuaded to strike for a week or two, but after all they were hardly in a position to risk their scant financial security; still, he agreed to run it by Chomsky et al. and get back to Roth. By December, however, Roth was turning down Mailer’s invitation to participate in a “Writers and Editors War Tax” protest, and soon his position on activism of any kind became categorical: “I’m a writer, and whatever my political concerns are they are expressed in writing.”
And so it went. Sitting around a poker table with Updike that summer—before the talk turned to Vietnam—Roth had remarked that he was “speaking up for masturbators” in his work, as indeed he’d been doing for a while now in giddy conversation with Jewish friends. The license to write about self-abuse was facilitated by other products of the zeitgeist he’d enjoyed, such as the provocateur rock group the Fugs and the LBJ-bashing satire MacBird! Then, too, as a writer, Roth was simply fed up with all the critics who went on about his unfulfilled promise: “nervous well-wishers may try to head Mr. Roth back to Newark at this point,” Wilfrid Sheed had written of his latest novel; “certainly he handicaps himself, ties up one good hand, when he tries to go it all the way without comedy.” Roth, by then, had gotten the message loud and clear: “I had written two proper books and I didn’t want to write a third.”
His original pages about masturbation had been part of a “longish monologue” he’d written shortly after finishing When She Was Good; this was meant to accompany a pornographic slide show (“full-color enlargements of the private parts”), but the finger exercise stalled after sixty or seventy pages, and only the bits about masturbation seemed salvageable. Next Roth tried again to write a novel about his wife’s urine ruse, and even used a variation of the title he’d given to his play on the same theme: The Nice Jewish Boy, or A Masochistic Extravaganza. This was to be an extended colloquy between an urbane psychoanalyst—Spielvogel naturally—and his hysterically aggrieved patient, Abravanel, who inveighs against his vindictive shiksa wife, Erika, whom Spielvogel (à la Kleinschmidt) likes to compare with the patient’s mother. “Lay off about my mother, damn it!” Abravanel explodes. He continues:
Nothing is true that’s so boring—when it’s boring it stops being true! I’m talking about my misery! I’m blowing off hate, all right! That nightmare! That prions [prison] of a marriage! . . . I’m lucky I’m even alive—the filthy little suicidal, homicidal bitch!
[SPIELVOGEL:] Let’s say your marriage was a masochistic extravaganza, how’s that?
[ABRAVANEL:] True! Understated, but perfectly true! . . . why, why, why—why did I take such ridiculous shit from such a hopeless specimen! What was I trying to be?
[SPIELVOGEL:] You tell me.
[ABRAVANEL:] A nice Jewish boy!
The psychoanalytic dynamic—the raving patient, the suave (and ultimately silent) analyst—was a crucial breakthrough. As Roth wrote in 1974, “Not until I found, in the person of a troubled analysand, the voice that could speak in behalf of both the ‘Jewboy’ (with all that word signifies to Jew and Gentile alike about aggression, appetite, and marginality) and the ‘nice Jewish boy’ (and what that epithet implies about repression, respectability, and social acceptance) was I able to complete a fiction that was expressive . . . of that character’s dilemma.”
The Nice Jewish Boy ends, and Portnoy’s Complaint begins, when our protagonist leaves off talking about his wife and gets to the source of his crippling guilt—the guilt that led him into his ghastly marriage in the first place—his mother. When asked whether Portnoy was influenced by certain foulmouthed stand-up Jewish comics of the era, Roth denied it: “I would say I was more strongly influenced by a sit-down comic named Franz Kafka and a very funny bit he does called The Metamorphosis.” That year at Penn, Roth had taught a Kafka-dominated course that he realized might have been titled “Studies in Guilt and Persecution.” At the age of thirty-three—Roth’s own age at the time—Kafka had written his famous “Letter to His Father,” which begins, “Dear Father, You ask why I am afraid of you.” One of Roth’s favorite assignments, beginning with that year, was to ask his Penn students to write a similar letter to one of their own parents. And so, with Portnoy, Roth took the assignment upon himself—“a novel about yet another family-obsessed Jewish bachelor in his thirties, which might have begun, ‘Dear Mother, You ask why I am obsessed with you. . . .’ ” Or, as it actually began after the long false start of The Nice Jewish Boy, “So let me tell you about my mother, a vivacious, seductive, competent, energetic, childish, arbitrary, iron-willed, hysterical woman, who loved and punished with great severity, and filled my childhood with crisis and high drama.” The many modifiers in that sentence would be abundantly borne out in the work that followed, so the next sentence (give or take a few words) became the actual opening of Portnoy’s Complaint: “So deeply was she imbedded in my consciousness that for the first few years of school I believed that my teachers were actually my mother in disguise. . . .” Roth often spoke of the brutal business of starting a novel—the many pages he had to write before the coin rang, as it rang limpidly, at last, here. He would proceed with the mother, then, and put aside the Maggie-like Erika for the time being.
As for the other Portnoys: among Roth’s students at Iowa had been five Jewish men who seemed always to write about the same folkloric family—the silent father who stoically stows his food away at the dinner table while a mother and sister (always) “hover over this little flame”—the son—“beating it and beating it and beating it.” This, Roth realized, was an archetype going back to the shtetl, where women sewed or kept shop so their men could be free to ponder the Talmud and cultivate an inner life. Later, in America, the father worked to support the family while the mother’s labors were often confined to a smaller household, and hence she poured her heart into caring for her children—her son(s) especially—who were expected to reward her love by becoming dentists, doctors, and lawyers, and bringing lots of grandchildren home. Kazin later explained the shock of recognition among second- and third-generation Jewish men who read Portnoy for the first time and were hauntingly reminded of what it had been like to be smothered by “the fantastic obsessive care, care, care” of the Jewish family—an obsessive care that, in Roth’s case, was all but equally divided among both parents (“You’re a plum!”).
Perhaps it bears repeating, then, that the Portnoys were not simply a folkloric paradigm—as Roth often took pains to suggest—but rather quite derived from his own experience growing up in an oppressively loving home. “Whew,” he wrote Lurie, after a visit with his parents in October 1964 (a time when he was intensively reading Flaubert):
It is so rough, and I always think the same thing: they brought me up, how come I made it? This is not to say that they don’t have their qualities of strength and lovableness, but they are actually geniuses of the bourgeousie [sic]—that is, they are so perfect at it. I suppose that when I have my violent physical ailments, or fears, it is the bourgeois in me trying to do harm to the sweet uncertain artist. Little does the bourgeois-in-me or the B-I-M know that the S-U-A just loves physical ailments, and fear too, for that matter. I suppose the two halves of me are in love without knowing it.
Kleinschmidt also made much of the division in Roth’s personality—and that of the narcissistic artist generally—though he would have been disinclined to characterize one part or the other as “bourgeois” (Flaubert’s trope): rather he thought of Roth, on the one hand, as the little boy who couldn’t bear being parted from a doting (but often severe) mother and so imagined his teachers were actually his mother in disguise—but also the budding narcissist who considered himself “superior to these people” and so ordered his smothering mother to “Go!” when she tried to bring his raincoat and galoshes to school. “As [Spielvogel] saw it,” Tarnopol explains in My Life as a Man, “it was my vulnerability as a sensitive little child to the pain such a mother might easily inflict that accounted for ‘the dominance of my narcissism’ as my ‘primary defense.’ ”
And what better way to air painful, shaming memories than in the form of a psychoanalytic monologue, which not only gave his fictional narrator a compelling voice—that of the brittle, uncensored analysand—but also served as an ingenious structural platform proceeding by mental association (“blocks of consciousness”) instead of chronology. It would be a while, though, before Roth realized these various “blocks” could be assembled into a single cohesive novel. “I have written my first short story in four years,” he wrote Lurie in late 1966 (eliding the ghastly short fiction he’d written circa 1963–64). “It is called ‘A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis.’ I believe the story is as good as the title.” What would become the first section of Portnoy appeared in the April 1967 issue of Esquire, occasioning a fracas between Roth and the magazine’s editor in chief, Harold Hayes. Roth had made an irritated phone call to the in-house copy editor, “Miss McBride,” when he discovered—too late—that she’d taken it upon herself to tweak the wording in three of his sentences and break two paragraphs into eight. “Miss McBride, as it turns out, takes Roth’s fiction probably more seriously than anyone else here,” Hayes angrily replied to Donadio, whom Roth had charged with relaying his complaint; “and her innumerable problems of trying to get this rickety magazine into print do not include the chore of taking abuse from the outside—again, from Roth or anyone else.” Hayes closed by inviting the agent to send Roth’s stories elsewhere in the future: “Frankly I don’t care.”
Esquire, then, was out of the running when Roth finished a story he considered a continuation of “A Jewish Patient” and was thinking of titling, simply, “Fear”; it was Brustein who suggested the less abstract “Whacking Off”—a “takeoff” on Letting Go, and also a nod to the narrator’s favorite pastime: “doubled over my flying fist, eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue and teeth—though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil.” For various reasons, it pleased Roth to sell his dirty story for all of $125 to the very “temple of highbrowism,” Partisan Review, explaining himself to the editor, Philip Rahv, as follows: “A masturbator yes, a capitalist no.”
“I knew that all those hours I spent locked behind the bathroom door just couldn’t come to nothing,” Roth wrote Goldstein, noting that the Eighth Street Bookstore kept selling out of the Summer 1967 issue of Partisan Review. Joe Fox related a night at the Epsteins’ where his colleague Jason had begun reading the story out loud to his guests, until Fox had to take over because their host was incapacitated with laughter. It was Fox who insisted that Roth was writing a novel: “it seems to me that hardly any transitional material is needed, that the material is rich and funny and sad, that the characters are all there, etc.” Certainly the demand was high for more short stories about the mother-haunted, onanistic Alex Portnoy. Roth’s old friend Solotaroff had recently departed Commentary—where memoirs about Jewish boyhood had been “coming out of [his] ears”—to start the quarterly paperback anthology New American Review; reading Roth’s third installment, “The Jewish Blues,” Solotaroff forgot his jadedness toward the genre and snapped up the piece for his inaugural issue in the fall. He also put dibs on all 110 typescript pages of Roth’s fourth and final installment, which the author proposed to call “Cunt Crazy”; Portnoy’s meditation on (among other things) his yen for gentile women would be published in April 1968 under the compromise title “Civilization and Its Discontents.”†
That same month—just over a year since Harold Hayes had advised Roth (via Donadio) to send his work elsewhere—an associate editor at Esquire invited “one of the most important writers of our time” to contribute to the magazine’s thirty-fifth anniversary issue. “ ‘One of the most important writers of our time?’ ” Roth gleefully replied. “Oh, you must be putting me on.” He pointed out that the only person who took him seriously at Esquire was the copy editor, according to Harold Hayes, whose sheepish apology Roth was kind enough to accept.
COINCIDING WITH Alex Portnoy’s first appearance in Esquire was a paper by Hans J. Kleinschmidt in the Spring 1967 issue of the psychoanalytical journal American Imago, “The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity,” which (after a lengthy explication of the narcissistic vagaries of Kandinsky, Thomas Mann, and Giacometti) presents the case of “a successful Southern playwright” whose life seems uncannily similar to Portnoy’s. Both had an overbearing mother who used to pack a little bag for them when they were bad and turn them out of the house; both imagined their teachers were really their mother in disguise, a woman who “in some very clever magic way” would somehow beat them home from school before the ruse could be exposed. There were other striking parallels, perhaps the most clinching of which was “the angry act” itself. “His rebellion was sexualized,” Kleinschmidt wrote of his playwright, “leading to compulsive masturbation which provided an outlet for a myriad of hostile fantasies. These same masturbatory fantasies he both acted out and channeled into his writing.”
Roth recalled that he’d first spotted (on Kleinschmidt’s desk) a copy of the Spring 1967 American Imago a year or so after it first appeared—that is, shortly after he’d finished Portnoy, from which Kleinschmidt had lifted supposedly autobiographical incidents, Roth claimed, and thereby “mischaracterize[d]” him. In fact, nobody had been more chagrined than Kleinschmidt himself when he discovered that his “Southern playwright” was a dead ringer for the hero of Roth’s most famous novel—a novel the psychiatrist had declined to read in advance, while its author was still in analysis. “Mr. Tarnopol is considered by Dr. Spielvogel to be among the nation’s top young narcissists in the arts,” notes the italicized author bio in My Life as a Man, wherein Roth fictionalized (barely) the contretemps that followed once he discovered his own portrait in Kleinschmidt’s paper. “Good Christ, Spielvogel, from whose example did I come to associate virility with hard work and self-discipline, if not from my father’s?” So Tarnopol argues re the “ineffectual” father of a “successful Italian-American poet” in Spielvogel’s “Creativity: The Narcissism of the Artist.” As for his compulsive “act[ing] out sexually with other women” (as Spielvogel would have it) by way of dealing with “anger and dependency” vis-à-vis a castrating wife and mother, Tarnopol tots up his actual infidelities—“Two street whores in Italy, a friend in a car in Madison . . . and Karen”—and declares them “practically monkish, given the fact of my marriage.” Roth himself remembered spending three or four sessions just berating Kleinschmidt for his “psychoanalytic cartoon,” until finally the man put his foot down and threatened to end their relationship. Whereupon Roth backed down—“By then,” he said, “I needed him”—hardly the first or last time Roth remained dependent (however angrily) on a dubious caretaker, male or female, despite his usual protestations of autonomy.
Thirteen years later, an academic named Jeffrey Berman discovered the Imago paper and connected it with Spielvogel’s almost verbatim text in My Life as a Man—a finding he incorporated into a book he was writing, sending the chapter in question to Kleinschmidt for confirmation. “Since in my article I introduce the brief case history of a Southern playwright,” the psychiatrist replied, “I in no way allude to or reveal the identity of the patient.” He concluded by threatening Berman with an “onerous lawsuit” unless he deleted the offending passages from his otherwise “excellent and extremely well-written chapter.” Berman brought a revised version of his paper to the “menacing and overbearing” Kleinschmidt’s office and presently persuaded him that the evidence was all but irrefutable and any lawsuit would be idle. “As I was leaving the office,” Berman reminisced, “he exclaimed, in a tone that struck me as unapologetically defiant and proud, ‘Incidentally, I’m Klinger too!’ ”—Kepesh’s psychiatrist in The Breast.