Philip roth, p.3
Philip Roth, page 3
On March 19, 1933, Philip Milton Roth was born at Beth Israel Hospital, where “every boy [he] knew had been born as well and, at the age of eight days, ritually circumcised in the hospital sanctuary.” By then his family was living, along with most of the city’s second-generation Jews, amid the tidy tree-lined streets of the Weequahic section, built some twenty years earlier on the former Lyons Farms at the southwest edge of Newark, the old boundary between the Hackensack and Raritan Indian lands. Weequahic (“head of the cove”) was so named by its main developer, Frank J. Bock, who fortuitously attracted a preponderance of Jews with advertisements for “cheap high-class building plots” and “No Saloons.”
By the time Philip was born, the family had moved from a slightly dingier place on Dewey Street to 81 Summit Avenue, a two-and-a-half-family house whose modest façade would one day be distinguished by a historical plaque. The Roths’ apartment—two bedrooms and a pleasant sun parlor on the second floor—was the nicest of the four they would occupy in Weequahic; the monthly rent was $38.50 (“I think we could get it now for the same,” Roth said in 2010), and it was a quick walk to Chancellor Avenue School and Weequahic High, two of the best public schools in the state. Their block of almost identical gabled houses with little brick stoops and patches of lawn ran along a high crest of the city (hence Summit), and on snowy days the children would gather at the corner of nearby Keer Avenue and swoop two blocks downhill to Leslie Street. The only better sledding in the area was arguably at the 311-acre Weequahic Park, designed by the Olmsted brothers and featuring a lake, golf course, and harness-racing track.
Though he grew up during perhaps the most anti-Semitic decade in American history, Roth noted that his own part of Newark “was as safe and peaceful a haven . . . as his rural community would have been for an Indiana farm boy.” Weequahic was bounded by gentile townships such as Irvington, once a hub of the pro-Nazi Bund and later, for Alexander Portnoy, a vaguely anxious paradise of ice-skating shiksas. Newark itself comprised a constellation of self-contained ethnic villages—Down Neck, Woodside, Vailsburg, Forest Hill—each with its own identity, its own little shops and churches, clustered around a thriving downtown business district. But none of these, not even Weequahic, was entirely homogeneous. One of the Proustian bouquets Sandy Roth would associate with childhood was the “stench of horseshit” on warm days as he passed St. Peter’s, the big Catholic orphanage on Lyons Avenue where the nun-harried children grew their own vegetables and hung on the fence staring at passersby. Along with the hundred or so orphans, a few local Catholic kids also attended the grammar school at St. Peter’s—including Tony Sylvester, the son of an Italian family who lived next door to the Roths on Summit, one of three gentile families on the block. Tony and Philip played together as kids, and on Christmas the Roth boys would admire the Sylvesters’ tree, but there was no socializing among the parents aside from basic civility. On Jewish holidays, for instance, Tony’s mother would make him wear nice clothes and admonish him to behave with special respect.
Their common aim was to work hard and make a place among the American middle class. “You give the wrong idea with that diddle-diddle music,” Roth irritably wrote the BBC producer Alan Yentob, a friend, after watching the man’s 2014 documentary, Philip Roth Unleashed. Roth pointed out that he didn’t hear a klezmer band until he was almost sixty, so it hardly made sense, in the program, to evoke his childhood ambience thus—as opposed to playing tunes from the American songbook, preferably as performed by Roth’s beloved Billy Eckstine and Newark’s own Sarah Vaughan. “During all my growing up in the Weequahic neighborhood I never saw a skull cap on the head of anybody in the street or on the head of anyone in all the houses of friends and relatives that I drifted through almost daily as a youngster. What you fail to communicate was the triumph of secularism in a mere two generations.”
Roth’s later nostalgia for the place was hardly universal. Across the street on Summit was Betty Anne Bolton—“the most beautiful girl in Newark,” said Roth, “our Gene Tierney”—who got out as early as she could, fleeing to France while still in her teens.¶ “I wanted something different from the way these people were living,” she said. “Everybody interested in money; just married, children—a boring suburban life.” There was a time when Roth would agree; like the literary idols of his youth, Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson, like myriad writers the world over, Roth would long to escape (as his alter ego Zuckerman put it) “the boredom, the righteousness, the bigotry, the repetitious narrow-minded types” of his hometown—then spend the rest of his life thinking about it.
* Anne Valentine—one of Roth’s first cousins on his mother’s side—remembers this as Bara and thinks Barer was probably a misspelling based on a mispronunciation. Her and Philip’s maiden aunt, Anita/Honey, used the name professionally and spelled it Bara.
† The Roths were plagued with appendicitis, the Finkels with heart disease, and Philip Roth would inherit both. The grocer Joseph Finkel, for his part, died of a heart attack at age fifty-four—an end hastened by a robber who locked him in his own freezer overnight.
‡ His expertise as a cook was reflected in the one dish he always made in his wife’s rare absences: salami and eggs. “All right, boys, here we go!” he’d announce to his sons, then flip the salami—whish—in the pan.
§ In the same interview, the eighty-five-year-old Florence decried the term shvartze (quite properly) as offensive, so her comment here was perhaps an unconscious generational slip.
¶ More than sixty years later she and her husband, Georges Borchardt, both literary agents, attended a ceremony at the French consulate, on Fifth Avenue, where Roth was named a Commander of the Legion of Honor.
CHAPTER
Two
AMONG THE GALLING ASPECTS OF ROTH’S PORTNOY FAME was the general perception that the hero’s archetypal Jewish mother, Sophie, was based on Bess Roth. Both Philip and Sandy remembered their home lives—at least during the later years of their growing up—as nothing if not conventional and decorous, largely thanks to their mother’s example: they seldom raised their voices; the boys had nice manners and used profanity so rarely that Sandy never forgot his mortification the night he came home from the navy and excitedly said “fuck” while regaling his parents in the kitchen. As Philip icily noted (in so many words) on more than one occasion, “Bess Roth was never depicted as the overbearing, domineering Sophie Portnoy, nor was the overbearing, domineering Sophie Portnoy intended to depict Bess Roth.”
The truth is complicated, and at other times Roth conceded that Sophie Portnoy was somewhat modeled on the more “suffocating” mother his older brother had known as a little boy, when Bess was younger, poorer, and under a strain. Indeed Sandy would go so far as to claim, late in life, that his “spirit [had been] broken” by his mother—who let it be known, both tacitly and not, that her love was contingent on his meeting a series of subtle, exacting demands. Offhand, he remembered the time Bess and her friend Mrs. Kaye took their boys on the number 14 bus to see a movie downtown: Sandy wanted to hold his own nickel like Mrs. Kaye’s son, but his mother made him beg for it, then scolded him—“I told you I should have it!”—when he couldn’t fetch it quickly enough from his pocket.
His mother’s rare-enough lapses have “to be put in context with the loving-kindness,” Philip insisted, and never mind that he himself was hardly an ideal child. Whereas his older brother had been obedient to the point of timidity, little Philip was “very stubborn and very territorial,” in his own words—even given to screaming, flailing tantrums, for which he was never punished in any corporal way. Which is not to say he escaped his mother’s “unthinkingly cruel” side, at least when younger, and certain episodes are indeed reimagined in Portnoy’s Complaint. “It soon became apparent that his main problem was his castration anxiety vis-à-vis a phallic mother figure,” Roth’s real-life psychiatrist, Hans Kleinschmidt, wrote in a 1967 paper detailing scenes that would soon appear in the funnier, more stylish form of Roth’s novel. He wrote, for example, about the time the six-year-old Philip threatened to run away from home, whereupon his mother packed a little bag and put the boy outside the back door, where he stood on a dreary interior landing lit by a single dusty bulb, at the head of a narrow stairway leading to the wide, forbidding world. “I can remember howling with fear and banging on the door, begging to be let back in,” Roth wrote for his biographer. “This punishment was repeated several times.”
“Castration anxiety” seems less an idle Freudian cliché when one considers the scene in Portnoy where Sophie sits beside her little son, who won’t eat, and brandishes a bread knife with “little sawlike teeth”: “Doctor, why, why oh why oh why oh why does a mother pull a knife on her own son? I am six, seven years old. . . . Why a knife, why the threat of murder. . . .” Why indeed? When recalling this drastic tactic, Roth had a hard time pinning down his own age at the time: Was he in a high chair, or as old as Alex in the novel? “Oh, that happened more than once,” said his older brother, who was careful to point out that the knife in question wasn’t really sharp enough to cause more than emotional wounding.
Alex Portnoy also remembers the time his mother took him, age eleven, to his uncle’s clothing store to get a bathing suit: “ ‘I want one with a jockstrap in it!’ [Alex says] Yes, sir, this just breaks my mother up. ‘For your little thing?’ she asks, with an amused smile.” Dr. Kleinschmidt somberly recorded, “He was eleven years old when he went with his mother to a store to buy a bathing suit,” quoting his mother’s amused dismissal as “ ‘You have such a little one that it makes no difference.’ ” Given the presence of a “saleslady” in this version—versus Portnoy’s jovial Uncle Nate—one may imagine the boy feeling “ashamed, angry, betrayed and utterly helpless,” as Kleinschmidt wrote. Roth, however, deplored the shrink’s “clumsy, tone-deaf reporting”: on the man’s couch he’d mentioned feeling “embarrassed,” period, at this “barely consequential act of parental stupidity,” and moreover pointed out that his mother’s “momentary amusement, though ill-advised, was not without empirical justification.”
Ribaldry of any sort was a rare indulgence for Bess Roth; her niece Florence remembered the way she used to finish her son’s sentences “every time Philip would open his mouth,” lest he say the wrong thing, and was in general “very controlling.” As for Dr. Kleinschmidt (described as “New York’s last Freudian” in a New Yorker piece written by another of his patients, Adam Gopnik), he tended to attribute most of Roth’s problems—“compulsive masturbation” among them—to the phallic mother figure. Suffice it to say, “phallic” is a reductive category for Bess Roth; on the other hand, she was certainly engaged with the phallic well-being of her favorite baby boy, whose penis she made a point of wiping every time he urinated. (“Make a nice sis, bubala,” says Sophie Portnoy, “make a nice little sissy for Mommy.”)
Roth was the first to admit that he and his mother “had a great romance,” especially during the first five years of his life, when she’d occasionally resort to extreme disciplinary measures. For the most part, though, he remembered it as “heaven”: they were alone all day, talking and talking, playing the kind of games Sandy had relished in his early childhood. Wistfully the older son remembered how his mother used to greet him each day at the kitchen door—“May I take your hat?” (hanging up his father’s straw hat)—and lead him to his own little side table, watching him lovingly while he ate. “Obviously,” said Sandy, “when Philip came along those games ceased.” Instead Sandy was enlisted to push the cherished bubala around in his carriage, up and down Summit, whenever his busy mother was distracted from the same pleasures. “He was the best-looking little fucker you ever saw,” Sandy observed. “He had these black, silky-soft curls, strong little face, dark eyes.” Philip was inclined to agree: apart from his winsome appearance, he had a way of saying “napnik” for “napkin,” and no wonder his mother was his “slave” (“I was too adorable for words”). The passion was mutual; indeed, one may wonder whether he ever again found the “pure bliss” afforded by “the colossal bond to my mother’s flesh”—as he wrote in perhaps the most lyrical passage of The Facts—“whose metamorphosed incarnation was a sleek black sealskin coat into which I, the younger, the privileged, the pampered papoose, blissfully wormed myself.”
Later Roth would examine those dark little eyes of his in childhood photos, and infer that, from the age of two or so, he’d already known he was “superior to these people.” No wonder his uncle Ed called him Sourball: in his face was a grim determination to go his own way. Kindergarten, then, was a splendid change—being in school, among other kids, confirmed him in his idea of himself and provided an outlet for his willfulness. Right away he was enchanted by the alphabet frieze above the chalkboard—the capital A, the small a; the capital B, the small b—a copy of which he always kept in his writing studio, later, thus reminding himself that books, after all, are merely words made out of letters. As for his adoring, controlling mother: One stormy day she and a dozen other mothers gathered in the foyer of Chancellor Avenue School, carrying little raincoats and rubbers so their children wouldn’t get soaked on the way home. Philip spotted her and gave her “a killing look.” “Go!” he said, venturing alone into the tempest. Tarnopol’s father, at the end of My Life as a Man, reminds his son of a similar episode to illuminate certain grown-up predicaments: “Everything you had to do by yourself, to show what a big shot you were—and look, Peppy, look what has come of it!”
Roth’s memory of his own independence—suddenly won, circa the age of five—is belied by another anecdote from Kleinschmidt, whose basic thesis was that his patient used narcissism “as a defense against anxiety engendered by separation from his mother.” Such anxiety, as Kleinschmidt saw it, could be traced to the way little Philip coped with the separation that schooling imposed. Given that he “experienced his mother as both good and bad,” he liked to imagine that his teachers were really his mother (the good one) in disguise, and hence “he was able to feel protected and thereby avoided any school phobias.” This evocative fantasy provides the opening vignette of Portnoy: “She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first few years of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.” But whereas Kleinschmidt proposed a calming projection of the good mother, little Portnoy suspects a more sinister import to such shape-shifting: “Of course, when she asked me to tell her all about my day at kindergarten, I did so scrupulously. I didn’t pretend to understand all the implications of her ubiquity, but that it had to do with finding out the kind of little boy I was when I thought she wasn’t around—that was indisputable.”
And yet Roth remembered his childhood as an idyll, mostly, over which his mother presided with impeccable, doting competence. “Lafayette, we are here!” he’d proclaim, returning from another triumphant school day—usually to find a slice of freshly baked cake (“under a covering of wax paper, to keep it fresh”) and a cold glass of milk waiting. “He who is loved by his parents is a conquistador,” he liked to say, amid later glory, and this applied to more than strictly literary endeavors. “The little Jewish boy does grow up to think of himself as all-cherishable,” the critic Alfred Kazin wrote in his diary on December 14, 1968, while mulling an advance copy of Portnoy, “and it has taken the contemporary sexual revolution to persuade him that his obsession with fucking is by no means strange or unfulfillable.” That Roth was cherished even by the standards of Jewish boyhood is beyond doubt; the degree to which this was a good thing is another matter. For his friend Jonathan Brent, the most compelling detail in The Facts was that rhapsodically remembered sealskin coat. About that, he told Roth, he’d like to find out more: “And [Philip] said, ‘Well, you’re not gonna find out.’ And in fact you never do find out.”
BEFORE HIS TWELFTH BIRTHDAY, Sandy remembered campaigning hard for a new bicycle; instead he got a sleek little Olivetti typewriter. He never touched it, and when another birthday came around he repeated his request for a bicycle: “They said, ‘If you give up your typewriter, we’ll give you a bicycle.’ And the punch line is: Little did I know that all the words in Goodbye, Columbus were in that typewriter.” Philip was bemused by the anecdote: it was true he’d typed most of his first book on an Olivetti Lettera 22, but in fact that model hadn’t been available until 1950 or so, and the typewriter his parents had given him was a beloved Royal. At any rate he was still in grade school when his mother taught him how to touch-type, thereby proving a steadier, more patient teacher than his father, whose part it was to teach him how to drive. (“Not that! Aww for chrissake. . . .”)
“I was clever and liked school, where I did well,” Roth wrote for the 1965 edition of Midcentury Authors, “but the education I remember came largely out of comic books, radio programs, movies, newsreels, baseball, and the evening paper. I don’t remember any of the books I read as a child.” Later in his career, however, Roth would describe himself as an “avid” childhood reader, often seen riding his bicycle to the Osborne Terrace branch of the Newark Public Library and filling his basket with books. He would also remember that he particularly enjoyed the work of Howard Pease—“the Joseph Conrad of children’s literature”—whose influence led him to roll a clean sheet of paper into his Royal and type “Storm Off Hatteras,” and, beneath that, “by Eric Duncan,” since he didn’t think Philip Roth was a proper writer’s name. Duncan’s career expired on that first sheet of paper (though Roth would later wish, half seriously, that he’d resurrected the pseudonym for Portnoy’s Complaint).
