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Herman and Elizabeth Roth's youngest son skipped two grades, entering high school at twelve. His senior yearbook was premonitory: "A boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense." Roth recalls that at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pa., he asked his English instructor if he should participate in activities that would help him get along with people. "Why would you want to do a thing like that?" replied the prof. Says the reluctant joiner: "It was wonderful ... the first great line of my education."
Formal learning continued at the University of Chicago, where Roth earned a master's degree in literature. Quarterlies published his first stories. One of them, The Contest for Aaron Gold, was selected for the 1956 Martha Foley collection of Best American Short Stories. By this time, he was a 22-year-old PFC churning out press releases for the U.S. Army. In off-hours, he used his Government-issue typewriter to compose the tales that would eventually merge in Goodbye, Columbus.
This work won the 1960 National Book Award for fiction and launched a career that has seen its share of fluctuations. Readers and critics kept expecting the fresh voice of that first book, while Roth labored to expand his range. Letting Go was a solid conventional novel about graduate-school life; When She Was Good told a depressing story of how a Middle Western girl became a man hater. Portnoy brought his distinctive tone back with a vengeance. Its success freed him from money worries but encouraged what he calls "the unreckoned consequences of art." It was as if the smartest and nicest boy in the class had robbed a bank. Says Roth: "I understood what literary fame and recognition were. I didn't know what it was to create a scandal—a scandalous act for which I was then paradoxically rewarded."
The Zuckerman trilogy distorts those rewards with comic punishments. Roth's inspiration for the character came after several trips to Czechoslovakia. He was stirred by the contrast between the benign annoyances of literary celebrity in the U.S. and the repression of writers in Prague, Kafka's home town. "In America," he observes, "everything goes and nothing matters. While in Eastern Europe, nothing goes and everything matters." The calculated absurdity of the Zuckerman books is that everything goes and everything matters.
Roth once wrote that deadly seriousness and playfulness were his friends, but he left out frustration. Of the six years it took to finally shut Zuckerman's mouth, he says, "Ten out of every twelve months spent writing are spent being wrong." This is a hard fact of literary life. It might well be the origin of Dr. Spielvogel's concluding line in Portnoy: "Now vee may perhaps to begin." —
—By R.Z. Sheppard.
Reported by Joelle Attinger/Boston
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