Patrick McManus (No, it was really Ivy) wrote:

>No Portnoy's Complaint? No Lolita? I used to have an enormous amount of fun
>reading those novels in the back of the room when I was in high school. The
>teachers didn't have a clue. I suppose that was because the novels weren't
>flagged on a banned list.
>
>Yours,
>
>Ivy
>
>
Years and years ago...late summer 1967...I was typing some guy's
master's essay. For money. That is what I did for cash, I typed other
people's work and sometimes reorchestrated Cage's scores to sound like
Debussy (mon plaisir). Anyhow, one day I was headed uptown to where I
lived, and bought some subway reading: a copy of Partisan Review. Why?
On the front cover was the name of a new Roth story: "Whacking Off." I
sat in the train and began reading. Shortly thereafter people started
looking at me as though a guy in a white uniform needed to drop a
butterfly net over my head. I was laughing so hard tears were rolling
down my face. At last--someone was telling the story of my life! It
didn't matter that he lived in Newark, where I'd never been in my life
to that point. He was a living mixed metaphor, i.e., a closet Jewish
pork-pounder, and my heart was filled with joy and laughter.

On the occasion of the Library of America "marbling" Roth in expectation
of him being next in line for the Nobel (let us pray), he allowed Terri
Gross to interview him, was his characteristically icy self, but told a
very funny story about that tale. Nobody but nobody would touch it.
Not Esquire, not even Playboy. Poison. Partisan figured it had nothing
to lose. When your circulation base is 22 plus a dozen college
libraries, nobody will notice. People noticed. Roth had to rewrite the
story to fit it into the Portnoy's Complaint frame, but that first
exposure (ahem) was one of the great moments of my misspent youth. "And
yet I would not feel so all aloooooone!"

Ken

--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538