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

for baseball, very much the product of a respectable, secularized Jewish family. The Castlebaums’ outward configuration—and household orderliness—resembled my own family’s: a highly competent and well-mannered mother, a hardworking, forthright father (a lawyer, however, and so a big vocational notch up from mine), and an older brother whom Marty strikingly resembled. Though there was something cheery in his temperate character I’d always liked, I found him more housebound than the boys to whom I was closest. If I remember correctly, Marty practiced the piano with real devotion, which in my mind may have separated him a little too much from those of us who counterbalanced good grades and courteous conduct with shooting craps on the sly and (against the unlikely possibility of being called upon to produce one) storing sealed Trojans in our wallets. His family lived even closer to the corner candy store than mine did, but Marty was only rarely to be seen hanging out in the back booths or standing outside by the fire hydrant where I would sometimes amuse the corner regulars with takeoffs of the school principal and the local rabbi.
    Marty attended a small college of about 1,900 students whose name meant as little to me as Wake Forest or Bowling Green—Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t what he said about his studies that made me want to find out more but that he appeared to have absorbed there precisely the qualities that he’d been devoid of as an adolescent, the sort of poise and savoir faire that encouraged a boy to run for student-council president or to date the most popular girl in class. In only a matter of weeks this kid, whom I had thought of as being in the shadow of more intense, loquacious types like me, had developed a confident, outgoing manner that smacked of maturity. There was even a girlfriend, whom he spoke of without a trace of his old shyness. I was astonished: I was still on Leslie Street, keeping my father at bay by heeding high school rules of conduct, while Marty appeared to have entered adult society.
    I couldn’t forget what he’d said about the girl: he would pick her up at her dormitory in the morning and they’d walk to class together across the campus. It wasn’t the romantic idyll that impressed me so much as the matter-of-factness. At this college called Bucknell, in less than a semester, Marty Castlebaum had become an independent young man sounding an independent young man’s prerogatives without shame or guilt or secrecy. At Newark Rutgers, I might be becoming more of a Newarker and an American but I couldn’t fool myself, even with the pipe and the Trojans, about feeling more like a man.
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    I N M ARCH OF 1951 my parents and I made the seven-hour drive to Lewisburg, about sixty miles up from Harrisburg, in a farming valley along the Susquehanna River; it was a town of about five thousand people, situated at the heart of one of the most conservative Republican counties in the state. I was to be interviewed by an assistant to the director of admissions, a courteous middle-aged woman whose name I’ve by now forgotten. In her office Miss Blake, let’s call her, told the three of us that with my high school standing and my Newark Rutgers grades I’d have no trouble being admitted with full credit for my freshman courses. She was less optimistic about my receiving financial aid as a transfer student but assured us that I’d be in a better position to compete for a scholarship after having proved myself at Bucknell.
    I was upset to hear that; part of the problem, I figured, had to do with my father’s promotion. Even though a big chunk of his salary still went to paying off his business debt, his earnings had increased measurably since he’d taken over as manager of the Union City office, and there had been no choice but to give the correct figure on my aid-application form. Yet, for reasons of pride and privacy, he forbade me to report