Roth was fascinated by the morbidities of her Irish Catholic background: she went to mass every Sunday (Roth “loved to watch her kneel”) despite having been molested by a priest, while her father, who objected to her ballet dancing, had once tied her ankles together and put her in the closet when he learned she was taking lessons on the sly. In her basement apartment, on the corner of Fifty-seventh and Kimbark, she would dance for Roth in her underwear (“enchantment itself”), but her inhibitions otherwise included vaginismus, a constricted vagina, which made intercourse impossible. In later years Roth was touched by the memory of her vulnerability and sweetness, and whenever he’d go to Chicago—to visit Sandy, Bellow, others—he’d try to find her name in the phone book. “I’d give anything to speak to her,” he said in 2013 (unaware that she’d died four years earlier).

  BY WAY OF an honor’s thesis, Roth was required to write two long essays—one, as he recalled, on Donne’s poem, “At the Round Earth’s Imagin’d Corners, Blow,” and the other on a play, perhaps Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey. For his final exam he was sent home for the summer of 1955 to read and ponder Montaigne’s “An Apology for Raymond Sebond,” then returned in August to write twenty-five pages on the subject. He was awarded his M.A. with honors, and was “almost anxious” to get on with his Ph.D.—two years hence: the war in Korea was over but the draft was still in effect, and Roth had decided to enlist in the fall and get it over with.

  Earlier that year, his father had been promoted to manager of a big Metropolitan Life office in the South Jersey town of Maple Shade; he and Bess bought a house (their first) in nearby Moorestown—“a small, ‘nice,’ Quaker town ten miles from Philadelphia,” Philip wrote the Maurers; “the neighborhood, of course, is Jewish, so please don’t become disturbed.” The neighborhood might have been Jewish but it was no Weequahic—rather a raw, nondescript subdivision, its rows of tract houses forlornly exposed on treeless streets. Bess missed her old friends, and soon they bought a pied-à-terre on Elizabeth Avenue in Weequahic and made the two-hour trip almost every weekend and holiday. Philip, meanwhile, would occasionally squat at Aunt Milly’s place in Elizabeth (an arrangement he used “very loosely” in Goodbye, Columbus as Neil’s extended stay with Aunt Gladys), where he sang for his supper by telling dialect stories that made his thirteen-year-old cousin, Anne, laugh so hard her “face and stomach” would hurt.

  He also stayed at the Groffskys’ in Maplewood. He and Mackie had been reunited at Thanksgiving and Christmas that year, after which they wrote almost daily “sex letters” and Mackie decided to transfer to Barnard to be closer to New Jersey and Roth. The two were becoming more compatible in other ways, too; as Heyman remembered, the young Maxine aspired to an intellectual camaraderie with Roth, eager to read books he recommended and indulge in sophisticated banter about, say, his former hero Cummings. “I mean, for christ [sic] sake,” Roth wrote of his disenchantment with the poet, “love is love and roses are roses and how long can he keep poking George F. Babbitt in the mouth? . . . A friend and I (the friend is Jordan [i.e., Maxine]) have a little game: every once in a while we write e. e. cummings type poems (usually walking the street), like ‘dung is to cow / as stars to the moon / and I / love you.’ ”

  She also kept him company while he ran around a high school track—and did sit-ups, push-ups, and chin-ups on the inner grass field—part of his intensive fitness routine prior to basic training, lest he end up getting injured or even contracting spinal meningitis from the filthy barracks like an old boyhood friend, Larry Klinghoffer. With or without such exercise, though, the couple’s strenuous sex games might have kept their minds and bodies in good working order. It was generally in the air between them. Chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Groffsky one night, Roth glanced over their heads and caught sight of their daughter mischievously touching herself at the top of the stairs. “I am young, drunk (on sex), and can never die!” was Roth’s mantra that summer, echoing his beloved Wolfe. “I thought I was invincible.”

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  THE BETTER TO GET ON W ITH HIS MILITARY SERVICE, Roth had turned down teaching jobs at the University of Nebraska (“Willa Cather I’m not”) and Concordia, a small college near Fargo. Sweating out his final term at Chicago, Roth prayed “the slaphappy Congress” would finally end the draft now that the war was over; then he hoped a bum knee (injured in a softball game when he was eleven) might render him 4F, but an army doctor on Governors Island officially declared him 1A that August. A fellow New Jersey boy and University of Chicago alumnus, Joe Josephson, had been told by a recruitment sergeant in Trenton that he could get away with a two-year service if he enlisted (versus the usual three or four years for volunteers), so he and Roth enlisted together on the same day, September 19, 1955. Roth was a little rueful over his decision, at Bucknell, to quit ROTC after a single semester because he was opposed to compulsory military training; if he’d taken advanced ROTC, he would have entered as a lieutenant instead of a private: “The first, though not the last, of the naive ‘principles’ with which I subverted myself,” he later reflected.

  His first weeks, at Fort Dix, were even grimmer than expected. “They shall/or will never make a soldier out of me,” he wrote the Maurers on October 15; “and I shall never make literati (or whatever the hell it is) out of them. I shall grit my teeth for two years.” Roth’s barracks was a “hellhole” that had been, as recently as a week before, a stockade for African American prisoners. On arrival every two soldiers were given a bucket of hot soapy water and told to scrub every square inch of the walls, floors, and bed frames, as well as the row of twelve filthy toilets opposite twelve filthy sinks, and a “scummy, open communal shower (open to the toilets) at the far end.” This went on for two weeks, until basic training officially began on October 3, and still they hardly made “a dent in the filth”: “Everything smelled of shit all the time.”

  Roth made friends with “a small contingent of the company who’d been to college”—a remarkably diverse group that included Barrington Boardman, Martin Garbus, and Matthew Andresino. The affable Boardman was an archetypal Wasp from Bridgeport, Connecticut: tall and square jawed, he’d come from ten generations of Yale and would later author a book titled From Harding to Hiroshima: An Anecdotal History of the United States from 1923 to 1945. Garbus, a Bronx Jew, would become a distinguished civil rights lawyer and occasional friend and jogging companion to Roth when both lived in Woodstock and Manhattan. As for Andresino, he was enduringly bemused by Roth’s fondness for a self-described “grubby Italian kid from Buffalo,” whom Roth called Wolly from the Italian guaglione (boy, urchin).

  Roth’s time in the army would, if nothing else, afford material for one of his best stories, “Defender of the Faith,” about an unscrupulous Jewish soldier named Grossbart, who uses his religion (and whatever else) to get out of unpleasant duties. Marty Garbus claimed that Grossbart was based on “a wise-ass Jew” they’d known at Fort Dix named Sherry, “who was endlessly playing every single conceivable angle”; indeed, Roth remembered Sherry as one of three buddies who snuck off the base with him that fall, driving eighteen miles to his parents’ house in Moorestown, where everyone took hot showers and ate one of Bess’s home-cooked meals before dashing back in time to avoid detection.

  When Andresino was told (in 2013) the basic plot of “Defender of the Faith,” he opined that Grossbart resembled no one so much as the author himself, remembering Roth’s ingenuity in evading the grubbier aspects of basic training. “Actually, though,” Roth had written Bob Heyman after his first week at Fort Dix, “I do not have too much to complain about, because, when upon the night of arrival the Sergeant asked who could type, my right arm went up faster then [sic] the world’s fastest erection. Since then I’ve gotten out of every indecent, undignified detail, and have been squatting before my weapon in the orderly room, typing out mess cards, morning reports, sick call crap, etc. I have found a home.” Even before Roth’s typing boondoggle—according to Andresino—he’d also gotten out of cleaning the barracks that first Friday night by excusing himself (“with great glee”) for religious services, and gave the same excuse every Friday thereafter. Nor was this just one man’s impression: Roth’s friend Joe Josephson remembered a time-test drill for which every soldier in the company had to assemble his rifle and report outside for inspection; Josephson was still struggling when Roth breezed past him en route to the parade ground, and would have gotten in trouble were it not for “a kind of crude character” who stayed behind to help him. “So the moral of the story is,” said Josephson, “you never know in an emergency who’s gonna come through for you.”

  To be fair, there were many indecent, undignified details that Roth did not or could not evade. Every ten days he drew twenty hours of KP: peeling potatoes, ladling soup in the chow line, cleaning the grease trap, and so on. On the last day of basic, around midnight, he and another guy were wearily hefting a kettle of potatoes when Roth’s partner dropped his end and Roth yanked up so the kettle wouldn’t come down on the man’s toes. He felt a searing pain in his lower back, and when he woke up the next morning he could hardly walk—“the beginning of a lifetime’s back trouble,” he noted. During his two-week post-basic leave, Roth went to an osteopath in Moorestown who diagnosed the injury as a sprained sacroiliac, advising Roth to rest on a heating pad and not make any sudden, jerky movements.

  Perhaps he bore that in mind with Maxine, though it doesn’t seem to have diminished the pleasure they continued to take in each other’s company. After basic, she came down from New York to visit him at his parents’ house, and on a couple of previous occasions she’d picked him up at Fort Dix for weekend leaves. “I would ride along in the backseat and when they got to New York they would dump me,” said Andresino, remembering with awe “the most beautiful woman you could imagine” spiriting his friend away. For his part Roth would later reminisce about the passionate way he and Groffsky “tore each other’s clothes off” at the door of their hotel room: “I haven’t done that in a while,” he mused at age seventy-nine. “I take them off nicely, I hang them up, I get in bed and I read. And I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed tearing the clothes off.”

  WHEN HE RETURNED to Fort Dix in December, Roth was assigned to clerk-typist school, where his mother’s touch-type lessons stood him in good stead. The “brutally boring” course—eight hours a day for eight weeks—involved learning how to process reports and type up duty rosters, sick slips, etc., but as the best typist in class Roth would be given first dibs on his next assignment: “As it works out, the slow typists have all been going to Greenland and points even norther,” he wrote Heyman; “the fast boys (I am a fast boy) get the stateside assignments if they want them, or Europe.” At first Roth thought he’d plump for the free trip to Europe (“in my mind’s eye I am sleeping with a fetching Nazi-type blond, vigorous and catlike and washing my underwear and socks”), but when it came to a point he couldn’t leave Mackie, whom he thought, in certain moods, he might like to marry someday. By the time he graduated in February—and was presented with a silver identification bracelet for finishing first in his class (“You should be damn proud of this, Roth,” said the presiding major)—he’d chosen an assignment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

  The personnel officer at the hospital was impressed by Roth’s academic credentials and gave him a plum job in the Public Information Office, where his main task was interviewing new patients and writing press releases for their hometown newspapers. It was easy but tedious work, leavened only a little by the tumult surrounding Eisenhower’s admission as a patient, in June 1956, for an acute inflammation of the small intestine; Roth later claimed to have shaken the president’s hand, though mostly he interacted with a young man from the White House press office who’d commandeered his desk and “whose un-Daedalian Republican outlook on life it was my youthful duty to skewer heartlessly in sardonic letters to a girlfriend back in New Jersey.”

  Roth’s fiction, meanwhile, had stalled amid the distractions of army life, as well as a sense that his apprenticeship had led him into a dead end. He didn’t want to write about sensitive children anymore, and when he tried writing about Jews—as in a novel, aborted after some thirty pages, “about an old Jew who can’t make up his mind between money and god”—the results were just as lugubrious. Given that he couldn’t seem to make compelling fiction out of his own experience, Roth found himself all too susceptible, still, to the influence of whatever writer he happened to be reading most intensively at the time. While in Chicago the previous March, Roth had reported to the Maurers that he’d written a story with “a little too much Hemingway in it,” and otherwise most of his effort was spent “vulcanizing [his] old stuff.” Finally he swore “not to write a goddam word for at least a year,” or at least until his critical and imaginative faculties were no longer at such fatal odds. So matters stood prior to his arrival at Walter Reed, where at last he had the means “to be a strict schedule abiding writer” again. “I’ve got to begin to work or else I’m sure I’ll give up on myself,” he wrote, “and I’m too—well, not good; but full of the rumor of promise to not give myself and writing a big decent chance. Well, I will.”

  Perhaps the most important aesthetic lesson of Roth’s youth, via readings of The Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn, was “the power of a voice”—now if only he could find a voice that sounded more like his own. Crucially, around the time he worried about giving up on himself, he discovered The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and was struck by a “kind of high-faluting [sic] conversational tone I like,” and also by Saul Bellow’s willingness to indulge in sprawling narrative abundance, not at all constrained by Neo-Aristotelian concerns with form and structure. Interviewed for a 1993 BBC documentary on Roth, Bellow pointed out that he and his younger colleague were both “book-intoxicated street kids from American cities” and particularly applauded the quality in Roth’s work that was arguably most derived from his own—“a combination of street language and literary sophistication”—or, as Roth said of Bellow, “he has managed brilliantly to close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon.” While reading Augie March in 1956, it occurred to Roth that he himself had “ideas galore for stories”—stories with actual Jews in them, and Newark too.

  That year he was further inspired by Bellow’s Seize the Day, with its vivid evocation of Jewish life on the Upper West Side—devoid of the sentimentality that marked the work of the “apologists, nostalgists, publicists, and propagandists” who had dominated Jewish American fiction prior to Bellow. And Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant was “the next clump on the head,” as Roth put it, “which is you can write about the Jewish poor, you can write about the Jewish inarticulate, you can describe things near at hand, like a grocery store. . . . And that had a terrific impact on me.” Though it would take decades for Roth to render Newark with the kind of painstaking, reportorial detail characteristic of his American Trilogy, the sketchy beginnings of such a project were inspired by Malamud’s Brooklyn and Bellow’s Chicago and Upper West Side. By the time The Assistant was published, in 1957, Roth had taken his first real steps toward an awesome maturity, and so was moved to write the Maurers with a hubris only somewhat tongue-in-cheek: “[Malamud] and Bellow are the only two people, outside of me, that are writing things worth reading.” And Roth was reading everything they published—the Malamud stories soon to be collected in The Magic Barrel, for instance, which he snapped up “the day they appeared” in Partisan Review and Commentary. Far from the Runyonesque eloquence of Augie March and company, the Yiddish-inflected immigrant speech found in Malamud was “a heap of broken verbal bones that looked, until he came along and made them dance to his sad tune, to be of use no longer to anyone other than a Borscht Belt comic or a professional nostalgist.” And Malamud’s people were something of both, and this too was a revelation: you could feel sorry for his Jewish failures but also laugh at them; their wry acceptance of every kind of misery reminded Roth of the “eerie clowning” of Beckett’s Molloy and Malone.

  Of these two masters, and rivals, Bellow would prove the more congenial—a matter of temperament as much as style. A great admirer of Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, Roth was in awe—but a little skeptical too—of what would ultimately seem the “revolutionary” exuberance of Augie March: a rejection of the alienated, conscience-haunted ethos of Bellow’s first two novels, of Kafka and Dostoyevsky, of formal niceties altogether, a doffing of the “Flaubertian corset” (as their friend Richard Stern put it) that bristled against everything Roth had soberly accepted at the University of Chicago. “As for Augie March,” Roth noted in 1956, “I can’t bring myself to say good things of it, though one sort of feels obliged to in its huge presence.” Its presence would only grow huger as Roth advanced in his own work—a little awkwardly at first, with the meandering set pieces of his first novel, Letting Go, and thence to the ranting flamboyance of Portnoy and other novels, an effect that would become so typically Rothian that Alfred Kazin dubbed it “the aria bit.” Finally, having attained a like eminence, Roth was ideally receptive to Bellow’s reminiscence (for Roth’s benefit) of his “triumphant feeling,” after a long creative malaise, when he wrote the first paragraph of Augie March: “In the next two years I seldom looked into Fowler’s Modern English Usage.” Roth would often quote Augie’s first six words as a declaration of independence: “I am an American, Chicago born.” An American—not a Jew, not a Jewish American, but a fully immersed participant in the commotion of American life. Indeed, like Roth’s previous literary idol, Wolfe, Bellow had discovered America as a grand subject—but, as Roth liked to say, “where Wolfe was merely a half-genius with the limitations of a half-genius, Bellow was a complete genius without any limitations I could see.” For Roth, the only twentieth-century American writer of comparable stature was Faulkner.