In The Facts, Roth would paint a far bleaker picture of his cohabitation with Maggie than their respective 1959 accounts of the kitten Allegra and Maggie’s careful postoperative nursing would suggest: “I’m as surprised today as I was then that we didn’t wind up—one or both of us—maimed or dead. . . . By the beginning of the year in which Goodbye, Columbus was to be published, I was nearly as ripe for hospitalization as she was, my basement apartment having all but become a psychiatric ward with café curtains.” Before Maggie had lost (or sublet) her apartment on West Thirteenth, it had been burglarized, she claimed, and among the stolen items was the old Royal typewriter Roth’s parents had given him as a boy—a “sacred relic” that had stood him in good stead through high school, college, and graduate school: “It was my plow,” he said. “It was my sewing machine. It was my rifle and my fishing rod.” But Maggie had wanted to work on her own fiction, and after all Roth was using the Olivetti by then. On or about February 18—a full five weeks after he’d departed the hospital in Maggie’s care and constant company, during which they’d barely managed not to maim or kill each other—Roth noticed Maggie’s winter coat hanging in the hallway and “on an impulse” searched the pockets and found a pawn ticket for his old Royal. When he confronted her with it, Maggie burst into tears and said she’d been broke and had no choice, but Roth finally put his foot down: it was time for her to go. “I can’t go,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

  Roth was stunned. “It was true that in the middle of the night there had been two, three, even perhaps four fantasy-ridden, entangled couplings,” he wrote in The Facts (“I’m also quite bored with only having intercourse when he awakes partially in the middle of the night,” Maggie wrote in her journal), but he was certain that for a long time he’d been “erotically too mummified” even to dream about sex. “So I am a good Jewish boy and she is an hysterical schizophrenic Gentile girl,” he would later write Bob Baker. “I am covered with guilt and trying to figure a way out, and she begins to weep endlessly and tell me that if I don’t marry her she is going to kill herself.” She also threatened that—before (or in lieu of) killing herself—she would carry the baby to term and then “leave it on [his] parents’ doorstep.” Affecting lightheartedness, Roth said she had to get a rabbit test, at least, and rinsed out a herring jar for her to pee into and take to Estroff’s Pharmacy around the corner.

  As Maggie would eventually confess, she hadn’t gone directly to Estroff’s but had taken a detour east to Tompkins Square Park, where she found an obviously pregnant black woman and explained to her that she, Maggie, was involved with “a scientific experiment” and would pay three dollars (the sum varied over the years) for a jar of the woman’s urine. This was the urine Maggie collected at the woman’s “grisly apartment” (as Roth wrote Baker) and brought to Estroff’s, whereupon it was analyzed at Mirkin Laboratories on East Twelfth. The rabbit test was supposed to take three days. “I had never lived through three such days before in my life,” Roth wrote in My Life as a Man,† “though I was to know a hundred more just as grim and frightening in the years to come.”

  He’d been afraid to leave the apartment those first two days, lest she kill herself in his absence, but suspense got the better of him on the second night and he went for a little walk, popping in at the pharmacy on Second Avenue just in case the results were in. “Does ‘positive’ mean ‘Yes, she’s not pregnant’?” he remembered asking Mr. Estroff.

  That night he walked roughly 225 city blocks—from the East Village to Columbia and back—trying to figure out what to do next. In this connection he would often think of the last act of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, when the cuckolded Andrey, pushing his baby Bóbik around in a carriage, gets a piece of advice from old Chebutykin: “Put on your hat, take your walking stick in your hand, and clear off . . . clear off and keep going, keep going without looking back. And the farther away you get the better it will be.” Roth was considering Oregon, where Bob and Ida Baker lived nowadays; Maggie could have whatever was left behind in the apartment. Almost surely he would have done that, were it not for his parents; but who knew what such a loose cannon would do? Also, she might actually commit suicide, for which Roth would feel more than a little responsible. The main thing, he decided, was to persuade her to have an abortion; after the fetus was gone he could reconsider his options, maybe, but meanwhile he’d have to promise to marry her. And try to seem happy about it. What transpired when he returned from his long walk was, to the best of his recollection, recorded more or less exactly in My Life as a Man, wherein Tarnopol assures Maureen (the Maggie character) that he wants to marry her “whether [she’s] pregnant or not.” “Oh, darling,” Maureen replies, “we’ll be happy as kings!” Roth missed the allusion to A Child’s Garden of Verses and was puzzled by the androgynous implications of her response to a marriage proposal “so obviously delivered without heart or hope,” but anyway he pressed on with the rest of his bargain: a baby at this point would almost certainly mean the end of his writing career, he said, and therefore he’d appreciate her agreeing to an abortion; this she readily did, since of course there was no baby to abort.

  The next day Roth phoned his old friend Marty Weich, who was then in the midst of his internship at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital; two hours later, Weich called back and gave him the name of an abortionist on Park Avenue. The cost, as Roth recalled, was roughly equal to his bank balance at the time: three hundred dollars. When he offered to accompany her to the doctor’s office, Maggie brusquely declined (a relief, since he worried he could be arrested), then pocketed the money and spent the afternoon in a Times Square movie theater, watching and rewatching Susan Hayward in I Want to Live! (about a cocktail waitress who dies in the gas chamber for a crime she didn’t commit: “right up Maureen’s alley,” Tarnopol reflects). This, anyway, was the version Roth told in his novel and in The Facts, and elsewhere, for a long time; in 1966, however, around the time of the actual event—four and a half years after Maggie’s confession—Roth wrote his friend Baker: “But it turns out that instead of going to the doctor she told me she went to, who produced a period in her by means of ‘a shot,’ she went to the Turkish bath and sat there for three hours before coming home to tell me that the baby was gone, somehow. Pure bullshit, not even good bullshit, but in my madness, I believed it all.”

  In My Life as a Man, Maureen returns from her “abortion” looking “pale and wan (the strain of sitting six hours at the movies),” and claims the doctor had plied a knife and given her nothing for the pain “but a tennis ball to squeeze”—the same story Roth would recycle fifty-plus years later for his biographer, a false memory that was nothing less than the main reason he usually gave for deciding to marry her after all: “I had married her because I believed I had seriously wounded her in a horrible abortion.”

  Near the end of his life, Roth conceded that he must have misremembered aspects of Maggie’s tale and later confession—the result of endlessly trying to fictionalize the episode—most crucially (a) that she hadn’t actually claimed to be “seriously wounded,” much less without anesthetic, and (b) that she’d whiled away the afternoon in a Turkish bath rather than a movie theater. That she was “weeping and enraged” on her return from the miscarriage/abortion, however, he remembered vividly: “it may well have been that she was berating me, if not for the horrors of the abortion, for the terrible indignity I had caused her, but wildly berate me she did. A second subject for which she berated me was her certainty that now that she had done as I asked, I was going to run out on her.” In the latter respect she had, of course, simply guessed the truth, and in reaching for her old refrain—“You’re worse than my father!”—she was taking precisely the right tack. In any case Roth caved—just as his brother had caved, albeit under a less frantic brand of pressure. “To whom was I preaching my probity?” Roth would wonder and wonder. “Was all this taking place in a Conrad novel? ‘You miserable sonofabitch you’re worse than my father!’ Why couldn’t I have said: ‘Ten times worse. And if you don’t get your ass outta here in five minutes I’ll show you how much worse.’ . . . Why couldn’t I have said that!”

  Roth wanted to believe that Maggie had mentioned a knife and no anesthetic—that it had taken at least that much to force his hand—but really all she had to do was tell him he wasn’t being Good. “That’s the hook you get him on,” said a later (nicer) girlfriend, laughing. Why couldn’t I have said that? It was the sort of question Roth endeavored to answer again and again in his early fiction—in “Defender of the Faith,” “Eli, the Fanatic,” and Letting Go. “The drama of adult responsibility,” as he put it, “the promptings of conscience, moral striving, the demands of manliness.” In his case—and Sandy’s too—he was goaded to do the right thing not only by certain midcentury norms of male propriety, but by an eons-long tradition of menschlichkeit.

  “Seven years ago this month,” Roth wrote a friend in February 1966, “I tried hard as I could to earn the award for the Nicest Jewish Boy of the Century.” Another aspect of the whole nightmare that Roth would come to rue (“my collapse is pathetic”) was the way Maggie forced him to follow through on his promise the very next day—Sunday, February 22—Washington’s Birthday—when they had to take a train all the way to Yonkers to find a person who could legally wed them. “It was a farce,” said Vernon Gibberd, one of two witnesses with his girlfriend, Diana. The wedding took place in the suburban home of a Justice of the Peace named Hinchcliffe, whose gouty foot was elevated during the proceedings, and who half-listened to the murmur of spring-training baseball scores on the radio. That night Roth and Maggie took a room at the Algonquin (“because of the literary associations”), where Roth was impotent, though Maggie was too happy to care. As for Roth, he felt “broken, like an animal is broken.”

  He wasn’t alone. “The pain Maggie inflicted on me was equaled if not exceeded by the pain I inflicted on my parents,” he remembered. The day after his wedding, Philip informed Bess and Herman with a carefully worded letter, and the day it arrived Uncle Bernie phoned Sandy and said they had to go to Moorestown right away or else Herman might “do something drastic.” They were there for some three hours before Herman began to calm down, and Sandy never mentioned the ordeal to his brother.‡ Within a week or two, anyway, their parents had decided to make the best of it—what else could they do?—and for Herman that meant hocking his son to behave a little more like a proper husband. The first item on his agenda was for Philip to give up his slummy apartment in the East Village and live in Stuy Town near his brother’s family, and also to replace his wife’s “piece of shit” coat.

  “I have just about had as much as I can bear,” Roth wrote Solotaroff on March 11, “and I regret that you must be the first outside ear to have to listen. My brother and sister-in-law have also nettled, wherever they could, though my brother’s instincts are good; he succumbs, unfortunately, to his wife’s stupidity and selfishness.” (Sandy: “I had this Boy Scout attitude that if my brother wanted to marry her she was a good person. It was crazy.”) For a wedding present, Roth’s parents had given the couple an expensive set of Spode china, which ended up in Maggie’s possession along with just about everything else after their separation, when Roth implored the judge to bear in mind that it was “not an accident” his father had also given him—“in my name alone”—some rainy-day AT&T stock that his estranged wife was now eager to get her hands on too. Meanwhile, during the marriage, she made a point of calling her parents-in-law Mr. and Mrs. Roth.

  * I was unable to determine the nature of the short-lived job Maggie got sometime late that fall, after her Esquire job ended in August.

  † The novel about Maggie’s urine ruse that “more precisely duplicated the autobiographical facts,” said Roth, than anything else in his fiction, for the simple reason (learned at agonizing length) that to “reshape even its smallest facet would have been an aesthetic blunder, a defacement of her life’s single great imaginative feat.”

  ‡ He did, however, discuss it during a taped 2007 interview, to which Philip listened after his brother’s death two years later. “For as long as he lived Sandy never told me about this horrible event,” Philip confirmed in 2013.

  CHAPTER

  Thirteen

  ROTH WAS GRATEFUL TO ESQUIRE’S FICTION EDITORS, Rust Hills and Gene Lichtenstein, for giving him his first big commercial sale with “Expect the Vandals” (never mind their part in trying to take Maggie off his hands), and made a point of giving them first crack at the stories that would end up in Goodbye, Columbus. “Epstein” and the title novella were declined for understandable reasons (shmutz and length), but Roth was startled when “Defender of the Faith” was also declined in spite of the enthusiastic support of both Hills and Lichtenstein. Still, he expected a positive result when “Eli, the Fanatic” was “being bickered about at Esquire,” as he reported to the Rogerses: “All the editors supposedly have read and liked it, and now they’re wondering if it’s safe for them to do it.” Though he didn’t know it yet, and would never quite get the story straight, Roth had been effectively banned from the magazine by its executive director, Fritz Bamberger, an émigré from Hitler’s Germany who finally called Lichtenstein onto the carpet. “This is a self-loathing Jew,” he said. Lichtenstein, taken aback, began to remonstrate but was angrily cut off: “Do you know about Ken?” Bamberger asked. “Read about it.” What Lichtenstein learned about Ken—a short-lived magazine of the thirties founded by Esquire’s editor in chief, Arnold Gingrich—was that its editors had defied the Catholic Church by running a story about the church’s support of Franco in Spain, whereupon advertisers had abandoned the magazine and it was shut down after little more than a year. “We will never publish this man’s stories,” Bamberger declared of Roth.*

  The New Yorker, of course, had no such compunction about “Defender of the Faith,” which would go on to win second prize in the 1960 O. Henry Awards volume and earn its author a third appearance in the Best American Short Stories series. Roth never forgot the excitement of waiting for the March 14, 1959, issue of the magazine to arrive at his local newsstand, across from Klein’s on Fourteenth Street; on his third visit that morning he was finally able to buy two copies (one for his parents), and the rest of that day he read his story while eating, walking through the park, sitting on the toilet—again and again. “It was thrilling,” he said. “I had begun.”

  “I just received a letter this morning from a New Yorker reader accusing me of being an anti-semite,” he wrote the Maurers a few days later. “I’m arranging a party to go up to the Bronx, where he lives, and burn a cross on his lawn, so he can see the real thing.” If Roth had considered this an aberration, he was soon disabused; within a day or two Rachel MacKenzie, his editor, phoned to say that a number of Jewish readers had already canceled their subscriptions, and the magazine had drafted a letter for such people, as follows:

  We found Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith” an honest and moving study of an individual who used his religion for selfish ends, thus involving another person in a tragic conflict of loyalties, and we are astonished that you should find it distasteful in any way. It was far from the author’s intentions to write anything anti-Semitic, and the editors would not allow anything they felt was derogatory of any religion to be published in the magazine.

  But the letters kept coming. At first Roth was rather excited by the controversy; he hadn’t really been pilloried since his infamous send-up of The Bucknellian (save the odd crank who’d objected to his Eisenhower piece in The New Republic). He was curious about who these people were and what exactly was on their minds, and insisted The New Yorker forward every letter, “adverse or not.” “Your one story makes people—the general public—forget all the great Jews who have lived,” a typical detractor wrote, “all the Jewish boys who served well in the armed services, all the Jews who live honest hard lives the world over.” By “general public,” it occurred to Roth, his correspondent meant gentiles—the main readership for The New Yorker, after all, which had hitherto published stories only about “cute Jews,” as Roth put it, à la Leo Rosten’s The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. Just as the Jews of Woodenton had feared goyish reprisal for the greenhorn’s eccentricity in “Eli, the Fanatic,” Jewish readers of the magazine were accusing Roth of shaming them—a shanda fur die goyim.

  It was a sensitive time for postwar American Jewry. The events of the Holocaust were more and more openly discussed; an American edition of Elie Wiesel’s Night would be published the following year, and even non-reading Jews were aware of the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank, whose movie version was released the same week as “Defender of the Faith” appeared in The New Yorker. Many Jews wanted their heroes to be saintly victims such as Frank, or better still the kind of warriors found in Leon Uris’s Exodus, the biggest best seller of 1958 (indeed, the biggest best seller in the United States since Gone with the Wind). As Alfred Kazin would point out on the occasion of Roth’s sixtieth birthday, the writing of fiction was a relatively novel aspect of Yiddish letters, which valued so-called wisdom literature over the purely aesthetic: “any Jewish American novelist is in for trouble if he retraces Mark Twain on the subject—‘Jews are members of the human race; worse than that I cannot say of them.’ ”