My Life As A Man

was always time. Only one drawback: in that I am not a renegade bohemian or cutup of any kind (only a municipal judge could have taken me for that), I may not be well suited for the notoriety that attends the publication of an unabashed and unexpurgated history of one’s erotic endeavors. As the history itself will testify, I happen to be no more immune to shame or built for public exposure than the next burgher with shades on his bedroom windows and a latch on the bathroom door-indeed, maybe what the whole history signifies is that I am sensitive to nothing in all the world as I am to my moral reputation. Not that I like being fleeced of my hard-earned dough either. Maybe I ought just to call this confession “The Case Against Leeches, by One Who Was Bled,” and publish it as a political tract-go on Johnny Carson and angrily shake an empty billfold at America, the least I can do for all those husbands who’ve been robbed deaf, dumb, and blind by chorines and maureens in the courts of law. Inveigh with an upraised fist against “the system,” instead of against my own stupidity for falling into the first (the first!) trap life laid for me. Or ought I to deposit these pages too into my abounding liquor carton, and if I must embroil myself in the battle yet again, go at it like an artist worthy of the name, without myself as the “I,” without the bawling and the spleen, and whatever else unattractive that shows? What do you think, shall I give this up and go back to Zuckermanizing myself and Lydiafying Maureen and Moonieing over you? If I do take the low road of candor (and anger and so forth) and publish what I’ve got, will you (or your family) sue for invasion of privacy and defamation of character? And if not you, won’t Susan or her family? Or will she go one better and, thoroughly humiliated, do herself in? And how will I take it when my photograph appears on the Time magazine book page, captioned “Tarnopol: stripped to his panties and bra.” I can hear myself screaming already. And what about the letter in the Sunday Times book review section, signed by members of Maureen’s Group, challenging my malicious characterization of Maureen as a pathological liar, calling me the liar and my hook, the fraud. How will I like it when the counterattack is launched by the opposition- will it strike me then that I have exorcised the past, or rather that now I have wed myself to it as irrevocably as ever I was wed to Maureen? How will I like reading reviews of my private life in the Toledo Blade and the Sacramento Bee? And what will Commentary make of this confession? I can’t imagine it’s good for the Jews. What about when the professional marital experts and authorities on love settle in for a marathon discussion of my personality problems on the “David Susskind Show”? Or is that just what I need to straighten me out? Maybe the best treatment possible for my excessive vulnerability and preoccupation generally with My Good Name (which is largely how I got myself into this fix to begin with) is to go forth brazenly crying, “Virtue! a fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.” Sure, quote Iago to them-tell them, “Oh, find me self-addicted and self-deluded, find me self and nothing more!

Call me a crybaby, call me a misogynist, call me a murderer, see if I care. Tis only in ourselves that we are thus or thus-bra and panties notwithstanding. Your names’ll never harm me!” Only they do, Ka-reen, the names drive me wild, and always have. So where am I (to get back to literature): still too much “under the sway of passion” for Flaubertian transcendence, but too raw and touchy by far (or just too ordinary, a citizen like any other) to consider myself equal to what might, in the long run, do my sense of shame the greatest good: a full-scale unbuttoning, a la Henry Miller or Jean Genet…Though frankly (to use the adverb of the unbuttoned), Tarnopol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoirist-his revelations coming to seem like still another “useful fiction,” and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I’m saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close. Or maybe I mean that as far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words-words born either of imagination or forthrightness-as there seems to be (for me) no forgetting it. Maybe I am just learning what a past is. At any rate, all I can do with my story is tell it. And tell it. And tell it. And that’s the truth. And you, what do you do to pass the time? And why do I care all of a sudden, and again? Perhaps because it occurs to me that you are now twenty-five, the age at which I passed out of Eden into the real unreal world-or perhaps it’s just because I remember you being so uncrazy and so much your own person. Young, of course, but that to me made it all the more extraordinary. As did your face. Look, this sexual quarantine is not going to last forever, even 1 know that. So if you’re ever passing through Vermont, give me a call. Maureen is dead (you might not have guessed from how I’ve gone on here) and another love affair ended recently with my friend (the Susan mentioned above) attempting to kill herself. So come on East and try your luck. See me. You always liked a little adventure. As did your esteemed professor of sublimation and high art, Peter T.

My dispute with Spielvogel arose over an article he had written for the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies and published in a special number focusing on “The Riddle of Creativity.” I happened to catch sight of the magazine on his desk as I was leaving the office one evening in the third year of my analysis-noticed the symposium tide on the cover and then his name among the contributors listed below. I asked if I might borrow it to read his paper. He answered, “Of course,” though it seemed to me that before issuing gracious consent, a look of distress, or alarm, had crossed his face-as though anticipating (correctly) what my reaction to the piece would be…But if so, why had the magazine been displayed so conspicuously on the desk I passed every evening leaving his office? Since he knew that like most literary people I as a matter of course scan the titles of all printed matter lying out in the open-by now he had surely observed that reading-man’s tic in me a hundred times-it would seem that either he didn’t care one way or another whether I noticed the Forum, or that he actually wanted me to see his name on the magazine’s cover and read his contribution. Why then the split second of alarm? Or was I, as he was inevitably to suggest later, merely “projecting” my own “anticipatory anxiety” onto him?

“Am I submitted in evidence?” I asked, speaking in a mild, jesting tone, as though it was as unlikely as it was likely and didn’t matter to me either way. “Yes,” answered Spielvogel. “Well,” said I, and pretended to be taken aback a little in order to hide just how surprised I was. “I’ll read it tonight.” Spielvogel’s polite smile now obscured entirely whatever that might really mean to him.

As was now my custom, after the six o’clock session with Dr. Spielvogel, I walked from his office at Eighty- ninth and Park down to Susan’s apartment, ten blocks to the south. It was a little more than a year since Susan had become an undergraduate at City College, and our life together had taken on a predictable and pleasant orderliness-pleasant, for me, for being so predictable. I wanted nothing more than day after day without surprises; just the sort of repetitious experience that drove other people wild with boredom was the most gratifying thing I could imagine. I was high on routine and habit.

During the day, while Susan was off at school, I went home and wrote, as best I could, in my apartment on West Twelfth Street. On Wednesdays I went off in the morning to Long Island (driving my brother’s car), where I spent the day at Hofstra, teaching my two classes and in between having conferences with my writing students. Student stories were just beginning at this time to turn heavily “psychedelic”-undergraduate romantics of my own era had called their unpunctuated pages of random associations “stream-of-consciousness” writing-and to take “dope” smoking as their subject. As I happened to be largely uninterested in drug-inspired visions or the conversation that attended them, and rather impatient with writing that depended for its force upon unorthodox typographical arrangements or marginal decorations in Magic Marker, I found teaching creative writing even less rewarding than it had been back in Wisconsin, where at least there had been Karen Oakes. My other course, however, an honors reading seminar in a dozen masterpieces of my own choosing, had an unusually powerful hold on me, and I taught the class with a zealousness and vehemence that left me limp at the end of my two hours. I did not completely understand what inspired this state of manic excitement or produced my molten volubility until the course had evolved over a couple of semesters and I realized what the principle of selection was that lay behind my reading list from the masters. At the outset I had thought I was just assigning great works of fiction that I admired and wanted my fifteen senior literature students to read and admire too-only in time did I realize that a course whose core had come to be The Brothers Karamazov, The Scarlet Letter, The Trial, Death in Venice, Anna Karenina, and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas derived of course from the professor’s steadily expanding extracurricular interest in the subject of transgression and punishment.

In the city at the end of my workday I would generally walk the seventy-odd blocks to Spielvogel’s office-for exercise and to unwind after yet another session at the desk trying, with little success, to make art out of my disaster, but also in the vain attempt to get myself to feel like something other than a foreigner being held against his will in a hostile and alien country. A small-city boy to begin with (growing up in Yonkers in the thirties and forties, I probably had more in common with youngsters raised in Terre Haute or Altoona than in any of the big New York boroughs), I could not see a necessary or sufficient reason for my being a resident of the busiest, most congested spot on earth, especially since what I required above all for my kind of work were solitude and quiet. My