And so it went. Sitting around a poker table with Updike that summer—before the talk turned to Vietnam—Roth had remarked that he was “speaking up for masturbators” in his work, as indeed he’d been doing for a while now in giddy conversation with Jewish friends. The license to write about self-abuse was facilitated by other products of the zeitgeist he’d enjoyed, such as the provocateur rock group the Fugs and the LBJ-bashing satire MacBird! Then, too, as a writer, Roth was simply fed up with all the critics who went on about his unfulfilled promise: “nervous well-wishers may try to head Mr. Roth back to Newark at this point,” Wilfrid Sheed had written of his latest novel; “certainly he handicaps himself, ties up one good hand, when he tries to go it all the way without comedy.” Roth, by then, had gotten the message loud and clear: “I had written two proper books and I didn’t want to write a third.”

  His original pages about masturbation had been part of a “longish monologue” he’d written shortly after finishing When She Was Good; this was meant to accompany a pornographic slide show (“full-color enlargements of the private parts”), but the finger exercise stalled after sixty or seventy pages, and only the bits about masturbation seemed salvageable. Next Roth tried again to write a novel about his wife’s urine ruse, and even used a variation of the title he’d given to his play on the same theme: The Nice Jewish Boy, or A Masochistic Extravaganza. This was to be an extended colloquy between an urbane psychoanalyst—Spielvogel naturally—and his hysterically aggrieved patient, Abravanel, who inveighs against his vindictive shiksa wife, Erika, whom Spielvogel (à la Kleinschmidt) likes to compare with the patient’s mother. “Lay off about my mother, damn it!” Abravanel explodes. He continues:

  Nothing is true that’s so boring—when it’s boring it stops being true! I’m talking about my misery! I’m blowing off hate, all right! That nightmare! That prions [prison] of a marriage! . . . I’m lucky I’m even alive—the filthy little suicidal, homicidal bitch!

  [SPIELVOGEL:] Let’s say your marriage was a masochistic extravaganza, how’s that?

  [ABRAVANEL:] True! Understated, but perfectly true! . . . why, why, why—why did I take such ridiculous shit from such a hopeless specimen! What was I trying to be?

  [SPIELVOGEL:] You tell me.

  [ABRAVANEL:] A nice Jewish boy!

  The psychoanalytic dynamic—the raving patient, the suave (and ultimately silent) analyst—was a crucial breakthrough. As Roth wrote in 1974, “Not until I found, in the person of a troubled analysand, the voice that could speak in behalf of both the ‘Jewboy’ (with all that word signifies to Jew and Gentile alike about aggression, appetite, and marginality) and the ‘nice Jewish boy’ (and what that epithet implies about repression, respectability, and social acceptance) was I able to complete a fiction that was expressive . . . of that character’s dilemma.”

  The Nice Jewish Boy ends, and Portnoy’s Complaint begins, when our protagonist leaves off talking about his wife and gets to the source of his crippling guilt—the guilt that led him into his ghastly marriage in the first place—his mother. When asked whether Portnoy was influenced by certain foulmouthed stand-up Jewish comics of the era, Roth denied it: “I would say I was more strongly influenced by a sit-down comic named Franz Kafka and a very funny bit he does called The Metamorphosis.” That year at Penn, Roth had taught a Kafka-dominated course that he realized might have been titled “Studies in Guilt and Persecution.” At the age of thirty-three—Roth’s own age at the time—Kafka had written his famous “Letter to His Father,” which begins, “Dear Father, You ask why I am afraid of you.” One of Roth’s favorite assignments, beginning with that year, was to ask his Penn students to write a similar letter to one of their own parents. And so, with Portnoy, Roth took the assignment upon himself—“a novel about yet another family-obsessed Jewish bachelor in his thirties, which might have begun, ‘Dear Mother, You ask why I am obsessed with you. . . .’ ” Or, as it actually began after the long false start of The Nice Jewish Boy, “So let me tell you about my mother, a vivacious, seductive, competent, energetic, childish, arbitrary, iron-willed, hysterical woman, who loved and punished with great severity, and filled my childhood with crisis and high drama.” The many modifiers in that sentence would be abundantly borne out in the work that followed, so the next sentence (give or take a few words) became the actual opening of Portnoy’s Complaint: “So deeply was she imbedded in my consciousness that for the first few years of school I believed that my teachers were actually my mother in disguise. . . .” Roth often spoke of the brutal business of starting a novel—the many pages he had to write before the coin rang, as it rang limpidly, at last, here. He would proceed with the mother, then, and put aside the Maggie-like Erika for the time being.

  As for the other Portnoys: among Roth’s students at Iowa had been five Jewish men who seemed always to write about the same folkloric family—the silent father who stoically stows his food away at the dinner table while a mother and sister (always) “hover over this little flame”—the son—“beating it and beating it and beating it.” This, Roth realized, was an archetype going back to the shtetl, where women sewed or kept shop so their men could be free to ponder the Talmud and cultivate an inner life. Later, in America, the father worked to support the family while the mother’s labors were often confined to a smaller household, and hence she poured her heart into caring for her children—her son(s) especially—who were expected to reward her love by becoming dentists, doctors, and lawyers, and bringing lots of grandchildren home. Kazin later explained the shock of recognition among second- and third-generation Jewish men who read Portnoy for the first time and were hauntingly reminded of what it had been like to be smothered by “the fantastic obsessive care, care, care” of the Jewish family—an obsessive care that, in Roth’s case, was all but equally divided among both parents (“You’re a plum!”).

  Perhaps it bears repeating, then, that the Portnoys were not simply a folkloric paradigm—as Roth often took pains to suggest—but rather quite derived from his own experience growing up in an oppressively loving home. “Whew,” he wrote Lurie, after a visit with his parents in October 1964 (a time when he was intensively reading Flaubert):

  It is so rough, and I always think the same thing: they brought me up, how come I made it? This is not to say that they don’t have their qualities of strength and lovableness, but they are actually geniuses of the bourgeousie [sic]—that is, they are so perfect at it. I suppose that when I have my violent physical ailments, or fears, it is the bourgeois in me trying to do harm to the sweet uncertain artist. Little does the bourgeois-in-me or the B-I-M know that the S-U-A just loves physical ailments, and fear too, for that matter. I suppose the two halves of me are in love without knowing it.

  Kleinschmidt also made much of the division in Roth’s personality—and that of the narcissistic artist generally—though he would have been disinclined to characterize one part or the other as “bourgeois” (Flaubert’s trope): rather he thought of Roth, on the one hand, as the little boy who couldn’t bear being parted from a doting (but often severe) mother and so imagined his teachers were actually his mother in disguise—but also the budding narcissist who considered himself “superior to these people” and so ordered his smothering mother to “Go!” when she tried to bring his raincoat and galoshes to school. “As [Spielvogel] saw it,” Tarnopol explains in My Life as a Man, “it was my vulnerability as a sensitive little child to the pain such a mother might easily inflict that accounted for ‘the dominance of my narcissism’ as my ‘primary defense.’ ”

  And what better way to air painful, shaming memories than in the form of a psychoanalytic monologue, which not only gave his fictional narrator a compelling voice—that of the brittle, uncensored analysand—but also served as an ingenious structural platform proceeding by mental association (“blocks of consciousness”) instead of chronology. It would be a while, though, before Roth realized these various “blocks” could be assembled into a single cohesive novel. “I have written my first short story in four years,” he wrote Lurie in late 1966 (eliding the ghastly short fiction he’d written circa 1963–64). “It is called ‘A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis.’ I believe the story is as good as the title.” What would become the first section of Portnoy appeared in the April 1967 issue of Esquire, occasioning a fracas between Roth and the magazine’s editor in chief, Harold Hayes. Roth had made an irritated phone call to the in-house copy editor, “Miss McBride,” when he discovered—too late—that she’d taken it upon herself to tweak the wording in three of his sentences and break two paragraphs into eight. “Miss McBride, as it turns out, takes Roth’s fiction probably more seriously than anyone else here,” Hayes angrily replied to Donadio, whom Roth had charged with relaying his complaint; “and her innumerable problems of trying to get this rickety magazine into print do not include the chore of taking abuse from the outside—again, from Roth or anyone else.” Hayes closed by inviting the agent to send Roth’s stories elsewhere in the future: “Frankly I don’t care.”

  Esquire, then, was out of the running when Roth finished a story he considered a continuation of “A Jewish Patient” and was thinking of titling, simply, “Fear”; it was Brustein who suggested the less abstract “Whacking Off”—a “takeoff” on Letting Go, and also a nod to the narrator’s favorite pastime: “doubled over my flying fist, eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue and teeth—though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil.” For various reasons, it pleased Roth to sell his dirty story for all of $125 to the very “temple of highbrowism,” Partisan Review, explaining himself to the editor, Philip Rahv, as follows: “A masturbator yes, a capitalist no.”

  “I knew that all those hours I spent locked behind the bathroom door just couldn’t come to nothing,” Roth wrote Goldstein, noting that the Eighth Street Bookstore kept selling out of the Summer 1967 issue of Partisan Review. Joe Fox related a night at the Epsteins’ where his colleague Jason had begun reading the story out loud to his guests, until Fox had to take over because their host was incapacitated with laughter. It was Fox who insisted that Roth was writing a novel: “it seems to me that hardly any transitional material is needed, that the material is rich and funny and sad, that the characters are all there, etc.” Certainly the demand was high for more short stories about the mother-haunted, onanistic Alex Portnoy. Roth’s old friend Solotaroff had recently departed Commentary—where memoirs about Jewish boyhood had been “coming out of [his] ears”—to start the quarterly paperback anthology New American Review; reading Roth’s third installment, “The Jewish Blues,” Solotaroff forgot his jadedness toward the genre and snapped up the piece for his inaugural issue in the fall. He also put dibs on all 110 typescript pages of Roth’s fourth and final installment, which the author proposed to call “Cunt Crazy”; Portnoy’s meditation on (among other things) his yen for gentile women would be published in April 1968 under the compromise title “Civilization and Its Discontents.”†

  That same month—just over a year since Harold Hayes had advised Roth (via Donadio) to send his work elsewhere—an associate editor at Esquire invited “one of the most important writers of our time” to contribute to the magazine’s thirty-fifth anniversary issue. “ ‘One of the most important writers of our time?’ ” Roth gleefully replied. “Oh, you must be putting me on.” He pointed out that the only person who took him seriously at Esquire was the copy editor, according to Harold Hayes, whose sheepish apology Roth was kind enough to accept.

  COINCIDING WITH Alex Portnoy’s first appearance in Esquire was a paper by Hans J. Kleinschmidt in the Spring 1967 issue of the psychoanalytical journal American Imago, “The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity,” which (after a lengthy explication of the narcissistic vagaries of Kandinsky, Thomas Mann, and Giacometti) presents the case of “a successful Southern playwright” whose life seems uncannily similar to Portnoy’s. Both had an overbearing mother who used to pack a little bag for them when they were bad and turn them out of the house; both imagined their teachers were really their mother in disguise, a woman who “in some very clever magic way” would somehow beat them home from school before the ruse could be exposed. There were other striking parallels, perhaps the most clinching of which was “the angry act” itself. “His rebellion was sexualized,” Kleinschmidt wrote of his playwright, “leading to compulsive masturbation which provided an outlet for a myriad of hostile fantasies. These same masturbatory fantasies he both acted out and channeled into his writing.”

  Roth recalled that he’d first spotted (on Kleinschmidt’s desk) a copy of the Spring 1967 American Imago a year or so after it first appeared—that is, shortly after he’d finished Portnoy, from which Kleinschmidt had lifted supposedly autobiographical incidents, Roth claimed, and thereby “mischaracterize[d]” him. In fact, nobody had been more chagrined than Kleinschmidt himself when he discovered that his “Southern playwright” was a dead ringer for the hero of Roth’s most famous novel—a novel the psychiatrist had declined to read in advance, while its author was still in analysis. “Mr. Tarnopol is considered by Dr. Spielvogel to be among the nation’s top young narcissists in the arts,” notes the italicized author bio in My Life as a Man, wherein Roth fictionalized (barely) the contretemps that followed once he discovered his own portrait in Kleinschmidt’s paper. “Good Christ, Spielvogel, from whose example did I come to associate virility with hard work and self-discipline, if not from my father’s?” So Tarnopol argues re the “ineffectual” father of a “successful Italian-American poet” in Spielvogel’s “Creativity: The Narcissism of the Artist.” As for his compulsive “act[ing] out sexually with other women” (as Spielvogel would have it) by way of dealing with “anger and dependency” vis-à-vis a castrating wife and mother, Tarnopol tots up his actual infidelities—“Two street whores in Italy, a friend in a car in Madison . . . and Karen”—and declares them “practically monkish, given the fact of my marriage.” Roth himself remembered spending three or four sessions just berating Kleinschmidt for his “psychoanalytic cartoon,” until finally the man put his foot down and threatened to end their relationship. Whereupon Roth backed down—“By then,” he said, “I needed him”—hardly the first or last time Roth remained dependent (however angrily) on a dubious caretaker, male or female, despite his usual protestations of autonomy.

  Thirteen years later, an academic named Jeffrey Berman discovered the Imago paper and connected it with Spielvogel’s almost verbatim text in My Life as a Man—a finding he incorporated into a book he was writing, sending the chapter in question to Kleinschmidt for confirmation. “Since in my article I introduce the brief case history of a Southern playwright,” the psychiatrist replied, “I in no way allude to or reveal the identity of the patient.” He concluded by threatening Berman with an “onerous lawsuit” unless he deleted the offending passages from his otherwise “excellent and extremely well-written chapter.” Berman brought a revised version of his paper to the “menacing and overbearing” Kleinschmidt’s office and presently persuaded him that the evidence was all but irrefutable and any lawsuit would be idle. “As I was leaving the office,” Berman reminisced, “he exclaimed, in a tone that struck me as unapologetically defiant and proud, ‘Incidentally, I’m Klinger too!’ ”—Kepesh’s psychiatrist in The Breast.

  * Roth didn’t recognize his argument in Skeeter’s, though he was reading a lot of Kafka at the time and might have alluded to The Metamorphosis, thus: “Uncle Sam wakes up one morning, looks down at his belly, sees he’s some cockroach, what can he do? Just keep bein’ his cockroach self, is all. Till he gets stepped on. . . .”

  † Roth had tried yet again to write about the urine fraud in this section, and “for the first time” found himself becoming bored with his material. Prior to deferring that episode for another time/novel, he considered titling this fourth piece “The Shiksa Rag”—a pun. “I do not like ‘The Shiksa Rag,’ ” Lurie sternly informed him.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-Three

  IN SEPTEMBER 1967, ROTH ATTENDED A PUBLICATION party at “21” for Bill Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner; despite his otherwise excellent physical condition after a vigorous summer on Martha’s Vineyard, Roth experienced an ominous malaise that, Kleinschmidt explained, was a psychosomatic manifestation of envy for his friend. Roth denied it: he loved Styron’s novel and was delighted by its success, but Kleinschmidt stood by his diagnosis “right down to the day I nearly died from a burst appendix and peritonitis,” as Roth recalled.*

  A couple of weeks after the party at “21”—on Wednesday, October 11—Roth felt so terrible that he finally phoned his doctor, Arthur Seligman, who sent him to Doctor’s Hospital, across from Gracie Mansion. Roth was lying on a gurney when a tuxedo-attired surgeon, Ed Goodman, stopped on his way to a gala to examine him; he pressed hard on Roth’s right side and the patient almost fainted with pain. Goodman shed his tuxedo and operated almost immediately, discovering that Roth’s appendix had ruptured as long as a week ago, spreading deadly bacteria throughout his abdominal cavity. When Roth woke up the next day, his parents and Mudge were huddled at the foot of his bed; draining tubes protruded from his abdomen and he was heavily dosed with antibiotics, his survival in doubt for at least a day or two.

  He was in the hospital for seventeen days that first time, and every night Mudge brought dinner (the hospital food was inedible) and lovingly kept him company. For a few weeks after his discharge he seemed to recover nicely, but then nausea returned and he resumed losing weight. Readmitted on December 6, Roth was again opened up by Dr. Goodman, who found that the stump of Roth’s appendix was badly infected and also needed to be removed. “When am I going to get out of here?” Roth complained, after another sixteen days in bed. “I’m missing the fall of 1967.” “Don’t you get it yet?” said Dr. Goodman. “You almost missed everything.”†