I know a fair amount about Philip Roth. I’ve seen two films based on his work – namely Goodbye Columbus, years ago, and The Human Stain, recently (and holy moly, what an incredible amount of PLOT there is!). I believe that I once tried to watch Portnoy’s Complaint but couldn’t get through it. I think I quit when the central character’s harridan mother shrieks “your father is trying to move his bowels!”. I’ve read essays and commentary by Roth and articles about him and his creative process. I admire his achievements. I have, however, never actually read any of his fiction. At least if I have, I don’t recall. I think his short story, “The Conversion of the Jews”, is widely anthologized, but I believe that I have managed to avoid it. I find his obsessive sexuality a little offputting, frankly. And besides, we’ve got Mordecai Richler (or rather we had).
But I really liked Lisa Scottoline’s piece about him in the Times, called “English Class with Mr. Roth”. I liked what it revealed about Roth – that he was a generous and competent teacher – and about how every woman in the class had a crush on him – “Imagine taking physics from Einstein. But you want to be Mrs. Einstein”. I even loved the 70s reference to denim skirts made from a pair of old jeans. But what struck me most is an offhand comment that Scottoline, a very successful author of popular fiction, makes about the person she used to be, a person who wanted to be a writer, but doubted that she could: “In those days, I dreamed of marrying what I wanted in my life. Not of becoming what I wanted.”
WHAM. Yes, that’s it exactly. I remember being a girl who dreamed of acquiring power, a place in the world, through romance, through my association with a man. Paul McCartney, to be specific. And then my life unfurled, and somehow, some way, with a mixture of the heroic sacrifices of my foremothers, the good luck to have been born in 1953 in a first world country, and hard work, I got a chance that my mother, and her mother, and her mother’s mother, never had. The chance to become what I wanted instead of marrying it.
For this, I am extremely grateful.
