Unlike Keats, Shelley, Byron and Leigh Hunt (the young Romantics of the 19th century who achieved greatness as a community of writers with shared ideals and feelings), Anne Roiphe's literary and artistic heroes in the New York of the 1950s and 1960s were generally sexist males who, fuelled by alcohol, egotism and lust, seemed to incarnate the Hemingway myth of the virile, drunken writer. Many lacked Hemingway's talent, though some (such as Bernard Malamud, William Styron, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern and Jack Gelber) were certainly not slouches.
Like the earlier English Romantics, these Americans seemed to be indifferent to their hero-worshipping women. Mailer stabbed one of his wives and created a mystique from this crime. "Doc" Humes (co-founder of the prestigious Paris Review) published only two novels but was a champion talker, activist, filmmaker and architect, who became paranoid delusional after his experiments with LSD. He betrayed his wife and children to take up with Anne Roiphe, whose first husband (playwright Jack Richardson, whom she idealized as a genius) deserted her on her honeymoon, later pawned her family silver, china and pearls, and habitually left her and their very young daughter to go off in search of booze and women.
Apparently, these dangerously seductive and narcissistic men (not all were writers; some were painters or filmmakers, such as Larry Rivers and Frank Perry) had such charisma as to compel women to think they were being artists' muses by serving and sacrificing their own talents for them.
Anne Roiphe was one of these women, and her memoir is testimony about neurotic self-destructiveness that ironically makes for memorable literature. Though a reader may sometimes groan at the staccato prose and hopscotch chronology, not to mention all the name-dropping, her book's peculiar style reflects her insecurities, anxieties and self-recriminations during that period when she was unmoored and vulnerable, "waiting for a wisp of truth, a feather's brush of beauty, a moment of insight."
The granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland, she had a father who was an alcoholic adulterer, and her brother insisted that she would die of cancer because it was in her genes. She carried the spectre of Auschwitz in blood-memory, though she grew up on Park Avenue and led a life of material privilege. At 18, she studied the bronze statue of Atlas on Fifth Avenue and dreamed of having a man to "carry me on his back, to support my world, to lift me up and never put me down." However, she became a playmate for sad, lonely, self-indulgent men.
She was a willing victim, of course, so her vulnerability was caused by her own delusions about genius. It was also a madness, but one with reason - in contradiction to Roiphe's subtitle. She knew what she wanted, even if she misjudged the nature and value of her desires. It was also selfish in its own way because for most of the memoir she refers to her young unnamed daughter as "the child," almost as if the girl lacked any specific identity. Perhaps a motive is her wish to protect the innocent child by a mask of anonymity, or perhaps the reason is self-accusation.
Though she confesses to having felt like an "outsider" who became an abyss, Roiphe never seems to say no to any male who comes within pheromone distance from her, whether her child is within hearing distance or not. From Doc Humes to George Plimpton, from Bernard Malamud to Frank Perry, the men come and go, and the book often reads like a sordid diary rather than a literary odyssey. The only thing she rejects is an orgy, either because of cultural cowardice ("a good girl with her mother's voice in her head") or out of a need to protect her child from the chaos that was coming.
But, alas, the chaos was visited more on the child than her mother. The child was precocious in some ways: inquisitive about men's penises, at 16 months she could recognize the smell of scotch on the breath of actor Jason Robards, Jr. Though this anonymous daughter (we are told in an epilogue) is now an award-winning writer, her life has been marked by chronic anxiety and incurable disease. Anne Roiphe, on the other hand, turned from Anne Richardson, one of the licentious young set of the 1950s and 1960s, into Anne Roiphe, long-term wife and acclaimed author of fiction and non-fiction. Her art survived the world's and her own madness, but if this sounds like a fairy tale, it has a bittersweet aftertaste.
Keith Garebian's new book, The Making of 'Cabaret,' has just been published.