The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online

books he’d been reading on the subway and the train home. That’s how, at fifteen and sixteen, I came to read Winesburg, Ohio and A Portrait of the Artist and Only the Dead Know Brooklyn. He drew from nude models, he had his own apartment, as a sailor he’d sat in bars where there were whores, and now he did quick, expressive pen-and-ink sketches of Bowery bums. But great as my admiration was for these achievements, Sandy’s mode wasn’t one I could simply emulate: his studies were preparing him for a career as an artist, while my talent, as described in the family, was “the gift of the gab.”
    In grade school I’d been taken once by my Uncle Ed, a cardboard-carton dealer, to see a football game at Princeton. I had not forgotten the campus—either the green quadrangles or the evocative word—yet it would never have occurred to me to apply there. I knew from my uncle that despite the presence of Einstein, to whose house we’d made a pilgrimage, Princeton didn’t “take Jews.” (That’s why we’d rooted so hard for Rutgers.) As for Harvard and Yale, not only did they seem, like Princeton, to be bastions of the gentile upper crust, socially too exclusive and unsympathetic, but their admissions officers were revealed by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith to employ “Jewish quotas,” a practice that disgusted a patriotic young American (let alone a member of an ineluctably Jewish family) like me. A champion of the Four Freedoms, a foe of the DAR, a supporter of Henry Wallace, I detested the idea of privilege that these famously elitist colleges, with their discriminatory policies, seemed to symbolize. Though I don’t think I could have expressed this then in so many words, I certainly didn’t want to recapitulate, at Harvard or Yale, my father’s struggle at the Metropolitan to succeed with an institution holding a long-standing belief in Protestant Anglo-Saxon superiority. What’s more, if I couldn’t win a scholarship to Rutgers, how could I expect assistance from the Ivy League?
    There were other colleges, anyway, hundreds of them: Wake Forest, Bowling Green, Clemson, Allegheny, Baylor, Vanderbilt, Bowdoin, Colby, Tulane—I knew their names, if nothing more (not even precisely where all of them were), from listening to Stan Lomax and Bill Stern announce the football scores on the radio Saturday nights throughout the fall. I read the names of these places on the sports pages of the Newark Evening News and the Newark Sunday Call and saw them on the football-pool cards that you could buy at the candy store on our corner for as little as a quarter. The football pool was illegal—run, my father told me, by Longy Zwillman and the Newark mob—but I began to buy the cards when I was about eleven and, with a couple of other neighborhood kids, started selling them on the school playground for the candy-store owner when I was thirteen, establishing my sole affiliation ever with organized crime. Through the pool I probably became familiar with far more institutions of higher learning than was the college adviser at the high school, who had suggested to me, when I admitted I might actually like to become a journalist rather than a lawyer, that I should apply to the University of Missouri. When I told my parents her advice, my mother looked flabbergasted. “Missouri,” my mother repeated tragically. “They have a great journalism school,” I told her. “You’re not going to Missouri,” my father informed me. “It’s too far and we can’t afford it.”
    It was during Christmas vacation from Newark Rutgers that I got to talking to my Leslie Street neighbor Marty Castlebaum, with whom I’d had a genial, if not particularly intimate, friendship ever since grade school. Marty, who is now a physician in New Jersey, was something of a loner—a skinny, very tall boy, seemingly not so obsessed with sex or so romantically adventurous as my best friends. He was a good, quiet student with an enthusiasm