"And Then What?"

Abstract

"And Then What?" Alexandra Marshall (bio) In my letter to philip dated november 3, 1998, i wrote: I Married A Communist is a wonderful answer to the public assault, and a wonderful novel. As if your goal were to teach readers about the very and entire thing fiction exists to do, your novel shows what it would have felt like to have had a different but not-so-different experience from the one you actually had. So for the reader it's a freedom from whatever the his-and-hers discrepant set of "facts" might have been, and, much better, a brilliant experience of the absolute fictional truth. It's a pleasure to imagine what must have been your utter joy when you discovered this way to write your reply: a truly great idea, given that you had to come up with something, and would have been forgiven for coming up with far less. In Philip's immediate reply, he wrote: What a wonderful letter to get from you. I've read it more than once now. You say a lot of things I've been dying to hear. _______ I met Philip in 1970, in the months following the publication of Portnoy's Complaint, when it was widely (and wildly) assumed that Philip was Portnoy. In Reading Myself and Others, his collection of essays published in 1975, Philip answered the question he posed to himself—"Why was Portnoy's Complaint at once such a hit and such a scandal?"—"To begin, a novel in the guise of a confession was received and judged by any number of readers as a confession in the guise of a novel" (Reading 218). As scholars of Roth know better than I do, critics have not resisted the temptation to merge his biography with his fiction, nor to judge both his novels and his life on that false premise. He wrote in Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their [End Page 130] Work, "My overnight notoriety as a sexual freak had become difficult to evade in Manhattan, and so I decided to clear out—first to Yaddo, the upstate artists' colony, and then, beginning in the spring of 1969, for that small rented house tucked out of sight midway up a hillside meadow a couple of miles from Woodstock's main street" (Shop 132). That small, rented house was named "Broadview," and it was there that I met Philip. His companion was Barbara Sproul, who invited me to borrow her cabin named "Wake Robin" in the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony just across the valley. I was being taken into their home—like a rescue pet, as it felt at the time—because, since childhood, Barbara had been a close friend of my 28-year-old husband, Tim, who had just died, having cut his own throat. In being incorporated into the peacefully steady and loving routine of her daily life with Philip, I was given the precious gift of Barbara's consoling wisdom about suicide, and the equally treasured gift of Philip's own example. In our day-after-day routines that first summer and fall, during those Woodstock mornings in Barbara's "Wake Robin" cabin, I devoured the four books that Philip had published by that time, and started in on the reading list of American classics that Philip compiled to compensate for what he considered my inadequate education—I was a French Lit major—in the literature of my own language. Later, on their couch, on my own, I would discover Virginia Woolf, whom I would read straight through and later follow as a mentor once I too had been claimed by the writing vocation. But in those earliest months, when an afternoon walk to talk about books was the day's reward, Philip was my teacher. Barbara was then completing doctoral work in Comparative Religion and International Relations—her published scholarly work to be called Primal Myths: Creating the World—and was soon to join the faculty at Hunter College, where she led its Program in Religion for the next fifty years. On those Woodstock afternoons, Barbara's Pentax camera recorded the beauty of the natural world...