The Counter-Philip Roth

Philip Roth's new novel The Dying Animal contains this magnificent passage. Prof. David Kepesh, then 62, having acquired a beautiful 24-year-old mistress, a former student in his class, speaks:

Peel off the jacket and there is the blouse. Peel off the blouse, and there is?perfection. A young man will find her and take her away. And from me, who fired up her senses, who gave her her stature, who was the catalyst to her emancipation and prepared her for him. How do I know a young man will take her away?

Because I was once the young man who would have done it.

Finding this passage quoted in an ad for the book, and admiring it, I read it aloud to the woman I love. She said nothing about Roth's sentences?but asked me why I read them with such passionate...indignation?

I hadn't realized. Why would I be indignant? And then I knew: because I was once the young man from whom girls were snatched by older men. And not just once or twice. For the too long drawn-out years of my youth, a succession of older men?poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, Marxists and musicians?found it rather easy to peel away the young man, if the young man was me. Was it nature that gave me this fate, or culture?

Even if it was my particular nature, it was a tragic fate that possessed me and induced me to join the first class of 32 boys at Bennington. There the Counter-Rothian scene?lovely young woman, virile young man, fading older man?was rehearsed again and again. Upstream. The first Bennington girl I lost my heart to?from across the seminar table, the two of us listening to a lofty-minded poet hold forth about Romantic poetry?was taken by him so easily he didn't spill a drop of his loftiness.

There were many others?so many others. Like Bennington's sole blonde bombshell, still auditioning me as a boyfriend. I got a callback, and received a list of provisos:

You will take me to the Tuesday night poker game with the cool faculty?plus the owner of the Shell station at the bottom of the hill. I will determine when you cut your hair.

You will accompany me to all faculty dinner parties, and you will not react if I wear a gold lame halter top and Roman sandals instead of a peasant dress and bare feet like all the other girls.

You will stand up for me when the townies whistle at me.

While I was mulling these over, particularly that last, dangerous demand, fondly thinking I had leisure to consider, a 1950s-vintage poet came to Bennington to give a reading one evening. You could judge his vintage because he used two initials rather than a first name.

At breakfast the next day, the bombshell dropped the bomb. "Didn't you think 'Zachary' was amazing last night?" "Zachary?" Another girl nudged me. "Z.Z., remember? On the New Directions book jacket?" What did I expect? The Bennington of those days excelled in producing what we called "handmaidens to genius." A perfectly conventional girl could come there from Nyack High School, and somehow, in just a few terms, emerge fully able to give cocktail parties for her man's agent and publisher, shoo ex-wives away from his doorstep, negotiate with Yaddo to have someone keep an eye on his drinking and, I hear, massage his prostate.

You understand I'm not bitter. About this awakening-her-to-her-own-sexuality business?all very well to say, Prof. Kepesh. What your avatars really had all over me was different. These old guys?they could take a girl from me and immortalize her in words or music, introduce her to David Susskind, get her a rent-controlled apartment, find her work at a gallery or a publishing house, take her to stay with old friends in the Camargue, lend her maturity in her own eyes?at the same time they showed off her youth to their pals.

I? I could be ingenuous in front of their parents, be willing to stand in line for movies, not look silly with long hair or bluejeans. I had only one thing that the older men envied?access. It might take months of scheming for even the most glamorous color field painter merely to get a Bennington girl to join him for a drink. To them it must have seemed effortless, my ability to scare up four, five or more reasonably attractive girls to a table at Max's, a studio party in southern Vermont or a cocktail party in Cambridge. I suppose I must have seemed enviable. But the eminences grises had an uncanny ability to pick from a crowd of girls in Swedish clogs the girl in Swedish clogs for whom I really yearned.

Still, if one is patient, existence takes care of the rest. I was 37, and my dying animal moment did come to me, as it must do to all men. Finally, I saw it?the "scrim drawn across the proscenium of genius that obscures her vision and keeps her worshipping at a bit of a distance," as the Master puts it. "Look, Sam, I know an older man like you, with all your experience of women, would be a wonderful lover," she said, looking at me tenderly, "but I'm still not going to sleep with you."