Philip Roth - Letting Go

Philip Roth
Letting Go

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005, The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Award for the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 20032004.

BOOKS BY Philip Roth

ZUCKERMAN BOOKS

The Ghost Writer
Zuckerman Unbound
The Anatomy Lesson
The Prague Orgy
The Counterlife
American Pastoral
I Married a Communist
The Human Stain
ROTH BOOKS
The Facts Deception
Patrimony Operation Shylock
The Plot Against America
KEPESH BOOKS
The Breast
The Professor of Desire
The Dying Animal
MISCELLANY
Reading Myself and Others
Shop Talk
OTHER BOOKS
Goodbye, Columbus Letting Go
When She Was Good Portnoys Complaint Our Gang
The Great American Novel My Life as a Man
Sabbaths Theater Everyman

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1997

Copyright 1961, 1962 by Philip Roth
Copyright renewed 1989, 1990 by Philip Roth

All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York, in 1962.

Lines from Earth Angel, on , quoted by
permission of Dootsie Williams, Inc., Los Angeles, California.

Portions of this book have appeared in slightly
different form in Esquire, Harpers, and Mademoiselle.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roth, Philip.
Letting go / Philip Roth.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78862-7
I. Title.
PS3568.O855L4 1997
813.54dc21 97-6675

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

v3.1

For Maggie

The author wishes to acknowledge the generous help given to him during the writing of this book by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

All actuality is deadly earnest; and it is morality itself that, one with life, forbids us to be true to the guileless unrealism of our youth.

Thomas Mann
A Sketch of My Life

Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.

Simone Weil
Gravity and Grace

It may be that one life is a punishment
For another, as the sons life for the fathers.
But that concerns the secondary characters.
It is a fragmentary tragedy
Within the universal whole. The son
And the father alike and equally are spent,
Each one, by the necessity of being
Himself, the unalterable necessity
Of being this unalterable animal.

Wallace Stevens
Esthtique du Mal

Dear Gabe,

The drugs help me bend my fingers around a pen. Sometimes the whole sickness feels located in my hands. I have wanted to write but not by dictating to your father. Later I dont want to whisper last-minute messages to him at the bedside. With all the panic and breathlessness Ill have too much influence. Now your father keeps leaning across my bed. He runs in after every patient and tells me what the weather is outside. He never once admits that Ive done him an injustice being his wife. He holds my hand fifty times a day. None of this changes what has happenedthe injustice is done. Whatever unhappiness has been in our family springs from me. Please dont blame it on your father however I may have encouraged you over the years. Since I was a little girl I always wanted to be Very Decent to People. Other little girls wanted to be nurses and pianists. They were less dissembling. I was clever, I picked a virtue early and hung on to it. I was always doing things for anothers good. The rest of my life I could push and pull at people with a clear conscience. All I want to say now is that I dont want to say anything. I want to give up the prerogative allowed normal dying people. Why Im writing is to say that I have no instructions.

Your father is coming in again. Hes carrying three kinds of fruit juices. Gabe, its to him I should admit all this. He wont condemn me until I do first. All through our marriage Ive been improving his life for him, pushing, pulling. Oh decent decent. Dear, the pen keeps failing

Her letter had never been signed. The pen fell, and when the night nurse came on duty she was no longer needed. Nevertheless my father, obedient to the last, put the letter in an envelope and without examination mailed it. I was a second lieutenant in the artillery corps at this time, stationed in an unregenerate dust bowl in Oklahoma, and my one connection with the world of feeling was not the world itself but Henry James, whom I had lately begun to read. Oklahoma nights and southwestern radio stations had thrust me into an isolation wherein my concentration was exact enough for me to attend at last to the involutions of the old master. All day I listened to the booming of cannons, and all night to the words of heroes and heroines tempting one another into a complex and often tragic fate. Early in the summer that I had been called into the Armywhich was the summer after I had finished collegeI had spent my last six civilian weeks touring Europe; one week was spent visiting with a friend of my mothers who lived in London, where her husband was connected with the U. S. Embassy. I remember having to hear endless incidents from my mothers childhood while sitting with her friend in a small church in Chelsea; she had taken me there to see a little-known plaque dedicated to James. It was not a particularly successful day, for the woman really liked the idea of putting on long white gloves and showing a Harvard boy around cultural nooks and crannies a good deal more than she liked the nooks and crannies. But I do remember the words engraved onto that small gray oval tablet: it was written of James that he was lover and interpreter of the fine amenities of brave decisions.

So it happened that when I received the letter my mother had written and my father had posted, I was reading Portrait of a Lady, and it was into its pages that I slid the envelopes and its single sheet of barely legible prose. When I returned from the funeral, and in the weeks following, I read and reread the letter so often that I weakened the binding of the book. In my grief and confusion, I promised myself that I would do no violence to human life, not to anothers, and not to my own.