Hemingway was on his mind when he decided to depart that summer for an indefinite stay in Europe (“Hemingway didn’t get his Ph.D.,” he remarked to Cousin Florence). Meanwhile Wilt gave him two sections of composition in the spring, and Roth also agreed to teach a weekly night class in creative writing at the university’s Downtown College, an extension mostly attended by adults with day jobs. For his introductory lecture, “The Strategies and Intentions of Fiction,” Roth conscientiously recited twenty-five pages replete with the wisdom of Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Henry James, et al., then asked for questions; there was only one—from a neatly dressed, middle-aged black woman: “Professor, I know that if you’re writing a friendly letter to a little boy, you write on the envelope ‘Master.’ But what if you’re writing a friendly letter to a little girl? Do you still say ‘Miss’—or just what do you say?”

  SINCE FINISHING “VANDALS,” Roth had lost no time embarking on a full-blown novel, alternately titled The Interpreter and The Go-Between, about a Jewish American businessman who travels to Frankfurt to shoot a German, any German, as revenge for their crimes against the Jews. Roth was a little stymied by the fact that he’d never been to Germany—or had any experiences at all, really, similar to those of his characters—and yet he was certain the idea itself would sustain the writing of what was sure to be “a powerful moral document. . . . All I can say is that I think the book suggests that by 1957 the crimes have become so gross, so complex, the guilt so impossible to pin down, forgiveness impossible to portion out . . . that morality, as always, takes a God to understand.” Five months later Roth was still convinced his novel was “exciting and crucial (the story and the issues I mean),” though he’d managed to eke out fewer than a hundred pages despite interest from an editor at Random House, who wanted to see a manuscript when Roth came to New York for his spring vacation.

  Around this time Roth was also considering a long, comic story about the Groffskys—this after a lunch at the University Tavern with Dick Stern, an avid laughing audience for Roth’s adventures “in Jewish suburbia with the dazzling daughter of a prosperous dealer in plate glass.” “Write that, for God’s sake!” said Stern, as they walked back to campus. At first Roth was skeptical: “I wanted to be morally serious like Joseph Conrad. I wanted to exhibit my dark knowledge like Faulkner. I wanted to be deep like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write literature. Instead I took Dick’s advice and wrote Goodbye, Columbus.” Such advice was based on what Stern (and others) had observed as “a discrepancy between Philip as he told stories and Philip as he wrote stories”; Stern thought Wilt’s “heaping Henry James” on Roth was helpful only up to a point, whereas Stern was pushing him toward a reckoning akin to Bellow’s abrupt rejection of literature, or literary good manners, when it came to writing Augie March—a novel about life as he really knew it, evoked in a voice inimitably his own.

  As for big ideas, they were already baked into the Patimkin saga: an encounter between a striving young intellectual—steeped (no doubt) in the highbrow class attitudes of Riesman, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and the like—and the “pig heaven” (Bellow’s term) of newly assimilated Jews learning how to adapt to the country-club culture of midcentury America. Later Roth would faintly deplore his Chicagobred intellectual smugness, which he was at pains to spell out in his preface to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Goodbye, Columbus, referring to himself in the third-person: “His cultural ambitions were formulated in direct opposition to the triumphant, suffocating American philistinism of that time: he despised Time, Life, Hollywood, television, the best-seller list, advertising copy, McCarthyism, Rotary Clubs, racial prejudice, and the American booster mentality.” And yet his genial and even nostalgic condescension vis-à-vis the Patimkins would prove an ideal vantage point, and, relieved of the burden to animate ideas per se, Roth learned he “could hit long fungos,” as he later put it—a baseball trope echoed in an unpublished fragment about Zuckerman’s ecstatic discovery of his powers: “He would pound his fists on the walls of the little apartment in an expression of delight, of wonder with himself. And cry out loud, ‘C’mon baby, c’mon baby,’ like an infielder talking-up his pitcher. . . . A thousand perfect words a day: the wit! the tone! the mean asides! The conversations he simply seemed to take off some spool in his head! His head—could it be?—the head of a genius?”

  Since he was dealing directly with raw, recent experience—and finding a slyly ironic voice in the process—Roth would later deny there were any “literary antecedents” for Goodbye, Columbus. In many respects, though, it stands as a kind of Jewish Gatsby, given the charm of its prose and humor, its concision, and its theme of meretricious American-style success. Fitzgerald was on Roth’s mind when he referred to the jaunty, athletic Maxine as Jordan Baker, but the equivalent of Brenda, in terms of the story, is pure Daisy Buchanan—the golden girl with “two wet triangles” on the back of her polo shirt (after strenuous tennis with “Simp” Stolowitch), “where her wings would have been if she’d had a pair. . . . The smallness of the wings did not bother me—it would not take an eagle to carry me up those lousy hundred and eighty feet that make summer nights so much cooler in Short Hills than they are in Newark.” Neil is both Nick Carraway and a bookish, manqué Gatsby, never less than skeptical about the Patimkins and their prizes (“Gold dinnerware, sporting-good trees, nectarines, garbage disposals, bumpless noses”), and yet lyrical about the larger Jewish success story they embody—“a story of the West” tracing the progress of postimmigrant generations “towards the edge of Newark, then out of it, and up the slope of the Orange Mountains, until they had reached the crest and started down the other side, pouring into Gentile territory as the Scotch-Irish had poured through the Cumberland Gap.”

  For Roth, the main advantage of writing a book such as Goodbye, Columbus, instead of his Conradian Frankfurt opus, was that he discovered how funny and shrewd he could be, on paper, given a peripheral narrator whose main function is to find Jewish correlatives for Gatsby’s “gorgeous pink rag of a suit”—the whole zany fantasia of American gentility. The playlet of Neil’s first dinner with the Patimkins does in fact read like a conversation “he simply seemed to take off some spool in his head,” yet every line highlights, wittily, some fundamental aspect of the speaker, and in a single brief exchange we comprehend the family tout court:

  MR. P.: He eats like a bird.

  JULIE: Certain birds eat a lot.

  BRENDA: Which ones?

  MRS. P.: Let’s not talk about animals at the dinner table. Brenda, why do you encourage her? . . .

  Mrs. Patimkin’s prim, wistful admonition is also reflected (obliquely) in her lunkhead son’s affected fondness for “semi-classical” music such as Kostelanetz and Mantovani, though given his druthers he’d listen to his Columbus record for the umpteenth time, mooning over his bygone glory on the basketball court,‡ and meanwhile Mrs. Patimkin’s twin sisters, Rose and Pearl, appear at Ron’s wedding with white hair “the color of Lincoln convertibles.”

  Writing “a thousand perfect words a day” (or thereabouts), as if he were simply taking it off a spool, Roth finished his comic novella in roughly a month and declared it “positively the best thing I’ve done.” Suddenly he felt “in league with Malamud,” and his friend Solotaroff agreed that both Roth and Malamud, with Bellow, were engaged in a similar project of “adapting [Yiddishkeit] to modernism.” One evening—after a long day poring over antique issues of the Boston Evening Transcript for his dissertation on James’s sources for The Bostonians—Solotaroff stopped at Roth’s apartment to drink a beer and listen to his friend read this early passage from his work in progress:

  Though I am very fond of desserts, especially fruit, I chose not to have any. I wanted, this hot night, to avoid the conversation that revolved around my choosing fresh fruit over canned fruit, or canned fruit over fresh fruit; whichever I preferred, Aunt Gladys always had an abundance of the other jamming her refrigerator like stolen diamonds. “He wants canned peaches, I have a refrigerator full of grapes I have to get rid of . . .” Life was a throwing off for poor Aunt Gladys, her greatest joys were taking out the garbage, emptying her pantry, and making threadbare bundles for what she still referred to as the Poor Jews in Palestine. I only hope she dies with an empty refrigerator, otherwise she’ll ruin eternity for everyone else, what with her Velveeta turning green, and her navel oranges growing fuzzy jackets down below.

  Solotaroff recognized the shtick as the kind of thing bandied about with Geffen at University Tavern (“The fruit routine was in fact a variation of the two-neckties joke”§)—but then, too, this deft sketch of familial bemusement was “something new” in American fiction: “Roth was making public . . . the mentality of many of us who were trying now to liberate ourselves from twenty centuries, or so it felt, of communal solidarity, moral authoritarianism, and adaptive hypocrisy.” At any rate, Roth didn’t so much as look at his Frankfurt novel during the month or so he spent working on Goodbye, Columbus.

  AFTER THEIR NIGHTMARE summer vacation in Massachusetts and Moorestown, Roth and Maggie somehow managed to reconcile during the fall; by late January 1958, however, the affair seemed over for good, or so Roth reported a little apologetically to the Maurers: “I am always telling you that so and so and I are no longer seeing each other, and I guess the reason is always the same—marriage.” He assured his friends he was very sad about things, but really it couldn’t be helped. As for Maggie, she dealt with heartbreak by deciding to keep a journal (“under the influence of Virginia Woolf”), and her first entry recorded a “moving experience” with a delicatessen owner, who wondered why such a “good looking girl” didn’t have a boyfriend on Saturday night: “I replied there were some but not the one I wanted. He then got me frozen bagels.”

  Perhaps the most notable outcome of Roth’s Anglo-Saxon course was that he briefly dated one of his classmates, Susan Glassman, a soignée Radcliffe graduate who lived on Lake Shore Drive, the daughter of an orthopedic surgeon who’d been team doctor for the Chicago Bears and the Blackhawks. Remembering the experience, Roth would invariably describe the woman as “a pain in the ass”: she was forever expecting him to drop everything and take her to the hairdresser or some such, and he would do it, and still she “resisted [his] advances.” On February 10, she accompanied Roth to a lecture at the Hillel House given by Bellow, who, it so happened, had met Glassman on a previous occasion at Bard College. “I’m just going to go up and say hello to him,” she told Roth afterward, and that was pretty much the last he saw of Glassman, who would become the third Mrs. Bellow in 1961. “Turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Roth, “and the worst thing that ever happened to Saul.”

  Also in attendance at Hillel House was Maggie, who gave a brittle laugh when Roth came over to say hello. “Well,” she said, “if that’s what you like—!” When Roth went home that night he found a terse note in his mailbox “to the effect that a rich and spoiled Jewish clotheshorse was exactly what I deserved.” Maggie meant it, too. That night, in full Nancy Morrow mode, she wrote in her journal: “Philip appeared at the lecture with Susan and it was a relief for I couldn’t be jealous of her—She’s a petulant self-concerned girl of a type I find at best boring and at worst a nuisance. Instead, I was able to feel emancipated from him for if he really wants this sort of girl then I see him as a different person that I don’t really recognize and that I certainly don’t want.” For a time Roth also dated an editorial assistant at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose impression on Maggie, if any, went unrecorded. All such matters became moot when Dick Stern played “a disastrous Cupid role,” as he later put it, by inviting his friend Philip and his former babysitter Maggie to his thirtieth birthday party on February 25. Before Roth quite knew what was happening, he and Maggie “began to see each other again,” as he wrote the Maurers, “for company’s sake, and then, and then, etc.”

  Perhaps he figured he’d soon be a free man in Europe—a prospect, naturally, that made Maggie “very distraught,” according to a mutual friend, and was bound to cause more and more friction as his departure date approached. Already Roth was contriving to make a more permanent escape. Unknown to Maggie, he’d applied for a creative-writing fellowship at Stanford for the fall; if that fell through, he hoped to sell Goodbye, Columbus to Esquire and thus have enough money to stay in Europe until February 1959 or so, whereupon he’d return to Chicago and teach. And what of Maggie? As Roth recalled, he’d made her “furious” by floating an idea to live in New York once he returned from Europe; then, a week or so later, Maggie decided to follow him there: “What was bizarre was that her children had just moved to [the suburbs of] Chicago from Texas,” said Roth. “She would be able to see them regularly now—and so she was going to go to New York.” At the time, however, Roth’s own New York plans appear to have been a smoke screen; as he confided to Gene Lichtenstein, he himself had suggested that Maggie move to the city and “pave the way” for him, when in fact he was hoping to end up in Palo Alto or stay in Europe (and eventually return to a Maggie-less Chicago). He implored Lichtenstein to arrange some kind of editorial job for Maggie at Esquire, and meanwhile, too, he set up interviews for her at Commentary, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. “Maggie saw a lot of people and was well received in all quarters, though she got no promise of work,” Roth reported after they returned from New York in late March, while Maggie confided to her journal that the city had inspired “a strange kind of terror. . . . I wanted to take refuge with someone and, of course, the someone is Philip. How terrible this longing for a mate is.”

  For Roth, the trip was an unequivocal triumph. Since “Aaron Gold” had appeared in the Foley book, he’d had an agent of sorts, a genteel Princeton man named Joe McCrindle who liked taking long trips abroad. Roth wanted an agent who stayed in New York and focused on her clients, and Lichtenstein sent him to a friend, Candida Donadio, a hungry new employee of the Herb Jaffe Agency; within a few years the motherly, chain-smoking Donadio would command a stellar client list including John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Mario Puzo, Thomas Pynchon, and Roth, whom she promised, that spring, to find better-paying commercial markets for his short work and get him a good advance for a novel. Best of all, he had a festive lunch with George Plimpton at the latter’s East Seventy-second Street town house, where Roth also met Plimpton’s Paris Review colleagues Bob Silvers, Blair Fuller, and their friend Joan Dillon (daughter of Douglas Dillon, later secretary of the treasury under John F. Kennedy), who lived mostly in Paris and asked Roth to look her up when he came over. Roth hit it off all around: Silvers and Fuller became longtime friends, and Roth would always be smitten by the “worldly and glamorous and gracious” Plimpton. “Oh boy! How’re ya, boy?” he greeted Roth, wringing the young man’s hand and applauding his work in that ebullient mid-Atlantic accent (“I think from George you might have known how Henry James talked”). Roth felt like Augie March—“Look at me, going everywhere!”—and that night he phoned Tom and Jacquie Rogers and said as much.

  Practically the day he returned to Chicago he got a letter from Fuller, who spoke for everyone when he said how sorry he was Roth hadn’t submitted a manuscript for their Aga Khan Prize (five hundred dollars), given to the best Paris Review story of the year; he’d missed the deadline, March 1, but if he was interested . . .? Three weeks later Fuller acknowledged receipt of “Epstein,” which was now among “six or seven” finalists for the prize. Roth had written a draft of the story back in June 1957, but it had taken a long time to get the tone right. “It is the first time I’ve written a story with sex scenes,¶ and it was a delight, but I don’t know if a success,” he wrote the Maurers. Solotaroff, for one, was “put off by all the ugly physical detail”—the shmutz (dirt, filth), in short. “The shmutz is the story!” Roth snapped.

  Indeed, Roth had decided (for the first but hardly last time) that shmutz, the franker the better, was the funniest and truest way to account for certain basic human failings, such as an aging, hardworking Jewish man’s wish to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh at least once more—that is, with a woman other than his wife, Goldie, whom he “watched as she dropped her white nightdress over her head, over the breasts which had funneled down to her middle, over the behind like a bellows, the thighs and calves veined blue like a roadmap. . . . The nipples were dragged down like a cow’s, long as his little finger. He rolled back to his own side [of the bed].” That was the sort of thing that bothered Solotaroff, but the ravages of time are to the point: Epstein remembers when his twenty-three-year-old daughter was a “little pink-skinned baby” instead of a pimply woman with ankles “thick as logs,” romantically entangled with a “chinless, lazy smart aleck whose living was earned singing folk songs in a saloon”—hardly a suitable heir for Epstein Paper Bag Company, which the poor man has built from the ground. In any case, the consequences of Epstein’s unchivalrous thoughts are not lightly punished; after a three-week lark on the beach with a merry widow, he notices a telltale sore that he prays is a sand rash or something he got “from the toilet seat,” until he finally breaks down and delivers a marvelous cri de coeur: “When they start taking things away from you, you reach out, you grab—maybe like a pig even, but you grab. And right, wrong, who knows! With tears in your eyes, who can see the difference!” Finally his heart bursts with remorse, and as he’s loaded into an ambulance a doctor glances under the blanket and assures Goldie that the sore, at least, is simply an “irritation.” (The nature of that sore, as Plimpton remembered, was “the only editorial help” he ever gave Roth—this while preparing the Aga Khan Prize–winning story for publication in the Summer 1958 issue: “It was clear Philip didn’t know the first thing about what syphilis looked like. I had to call him up and straighten him out on his venereal symptoms.”)