The Life of Philip Roth, or, Zuckerman’s Complaint : THE FACTS A Novelist’s Autobiography <i> by Philip Roth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $18.95; 195 pp.) </i>

Dear Roth: I like having Zuckerman, the fictional figure you’ve nurtured for more than a decade, turn up in your autobiography. How sly to play the old tune of the charming, self-effacing young (old?) Jewish writer--yourself, in the prologue--writing Zuckerman a letter, asking for his advice, relying on his candor.

Not that it will fool anybody. Beginning your account of “the facts” by writing to him and asking what he thinks of this as your effort at self-exposure is a terrific way to let us all know this is not your adieu to fiction. It’s like reading an old manuscript in which the signature was written in reappearing ink: Now you don’t see it, now you do. As a writer I’m envious of the ploy.

Zuckerman, of course, falls for it. Did you think he wouldn’t kvetch at your abandoning him? You’re quite right when you tell him on Page 10 that never before have you worked without having the imagination fired up by a Portnoy or Tarnopol or Zuckerman. That’s what’s powerful and original here. But then you let him get away with telling you how mistaken you are, how much you need him after all, and things get a bit sticky. Please, Roth, I’m telling you this for your own good.

When Zuckerman begins his letter with “the candor you asked for,” I knew he would tell you not to do it. “Don’t publish,” he says. “You are far better off writing about me than ‘accurately’ reporting your own life.” I ask you in all honesty, didn’t you know that’s what he would say? So long as he can persuade you that you’ve left out that devilish “imagination” that gave Zuckerman license to cavort through two states and three countries, you will just go on being his servant. Truthfully, can you say you don’t see through him when he brings in his English wife, in her eighth month of pregnancy, with her cheeky list of objections to your autobiography? “Nothing is random,” she complains. “Nothing that happens to him has no point. Nothing that he says happens to him in his life does not get turned into something that is useful to him. Things that appear to have been pointlessly destructive and poisoning, things that look at the time to have been wasteful and appalling and spoiling, are the things that turn out to be, say, the writing of ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’ ”

That Maria doesn’t fool me. The exchange between the two of them on 188 is a tip-off:

“ ‘Uh-oh,’ she said, ‘still on that Jewish stuff, isn’t he? Doesn’t bode well, does it?’

“ ‘For us? Doesn’t mean anything either way.’

“ ‘Why,’ she asked, ‘do you have to say everything twice.’

“ ‘Do I?’

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘When you want someone to do something, you say everything twice. Obviously you are used to being disobeyed.’ ”

As if she didn’t know how easy it is to get a Jew interested in a good quarrel. She’s baiting him, and she’s baiting you. It’s just like the Arabs and the Israelis; they don’t want to be bored with their borders the way the Americans and the Canadians are. Zuckerman pronounces that you’re “not an autobiographer, you’re a personificator.” More Jew-baiting! And all those high-minded moral distinctions between the ethical motive of autobiography and the esthetic motive of fiction. I hear Yiddish theater is making a comeback on Second Avenue. Let me recommend Nathan and Maria. Take my friends the Zuckermans, please!

Don’t you say that “the facts” come from a different medium? For a change you’re not projecting all those cultural problems onto characters. What a relief! It’s about time you admitted how skeptical you are about the possibility that characters exist. I know all your work has been devoted to wondering whether there are any after all, while puncturing the relentless American belief in character. So it’s a pleasure to read this interview you’ve conducted with yourself.

I enjoy following Philip Roth the artist-to-be progressing from life in the family, through schooling in college and postgraduate degrees, to the discovery of his role as a writer, lover, husband and intellectual. In this pattern, the increase of knowledge and experience leads to the embrace not of harmonious wisdom but of a polemic stance: In growing up and responding to the demands of the various institutions he must deal with, he progressively extricates himself from all of them. He repudiates the entanglements of all institutions and conventional habits. Increasingly, he confronts the blunt facts of life directly, calling their disguises to our attention as a way of discrediting their ideological power.

You tell us that after a prolonged physical and mental ordeal, growing out of what was expected to be only minor surgery, it has taken an unusual effort for you to write the autobiography; you have, however, persisted in order to recover a sense of yourself that you thought you’d lost. In that effort of recovery, which turns out to encompass many roles, you “found no one moment of origin but a series of moments, a history of multiple origins.” And in trying to recover those “real-life” origins, you’ve avoided the temptation to dramatize “untruthfully the insufficiently dramatic, to complicate the essentially simple, to charge with implication what implied very little” and not abandon the facts for fiction. The result, you tell us, is a manuscript that embodies “ my counterlife.” Having relinquished your disguises and different roles, this autobiography, by contrast with “The Counterlife,” which “can be read as fiction about structure,” is “the bare bones, the structure of a life without the fiction.”

But the facts, Zuckerman claims, just don’t add up to much; you would have been better off writing about him. Who does he think he is? Don Quixote? Who else in literature ever questioned his creator this way as to why he was given a particular role to play.

Against the facts that you bring forward, the title of the book and several of its chapters--”Joe College,” “Girl of My Dreams,” and “All in the Family”--echo the radio and TV shows of popular culture. As works of the popular imagination, they echo the conventional lives, the stereotypes, against which you place your own account. Each chapter’s content, however, works against its title in an ironic way, beginning with “Safe at Home,” which is at once a baseball reference, an implicit comment on the safety you and your family felt in America by contrast with World War II and the murder of the Jews by the Nazis in Europe, and a way of highlighting by contrast the impact of the incursions of anti-Semitism into your Newark neighborhood. Similarly, the book’s title serves to parody the world of “Dragnet,” Jack Webb’s radio and TV show in which the detective asks a character in each episode for “the facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.” This phrase prepares for the comic version of the facts in your autobiographical enterprise.

You entitle the last chapter of your narrative, “Now vee may perhaps to begin,” quoting from the last line of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” That’s where you take us out of popular American conventions and institutions and bring us into the world of your own fictional creation. In the German-immigrant accents of Dr. Spielvogel, Jewish interpreter of dreams and fantasies, this chapter title refers to the process of psychoanalysis. By implication, it signals that you are no longer merely “the personificator” that Nathan wants you to be and have grown, instead, into a cultural analyst and simultaneously a cultural force, revealing the deepest structures of the modern condition. And as you reshape language through your satire, you bring the experience of the Jew as intellectual and sexual being into the mythological world of American culture, reminding us that the American encounter with him is at the heart of your comic universe.

Am I right? Did I get it? But I still have some questions.

All your life you’ve been working with the contradictions. Zuckerman imagines he can have a beautiful life with his Maria, but you know better, correct? Still, isn’t it time for you to find a new model for your world, find some new contradictions?

Entangling alliances indeed! You have an American college education, a graduate degree from the University of Chicago. You teach in Philadelphia and New York. Maybe you should plunge in all the way. Admit the benefit of literary institutions--money from the Guggenheim, help from the publishing world, etc.--and now learn about the other institutions. Yes! Why not? Get married, have children, adopt children, even, and struggle to make them come out right. Try the Long March through the institutions the way the rest of us have. We need you, Roth, to deal with our institutional grit. We need you (and not certain weaker writers who will remain nameless) to be the Dickens of the computer age. Enough of tourism. Isn’t it time to live up to your promise? Isn’t it time to settle down?

Sincerely,

Ralph Baumgarten