An undated photo of Anne Roiphe with her daughter Katie as an infant.GLORIA STEIN
Where did the impulse about devoting yourself to the romantic idea of these men come from?
I understand that this romantic idea of the artist seems somewhat bizarre today, but it was in the air in 1956. The opportunities for women were limited, and rather than become a nurse or a teacher, I decided to become a muse.
Many of us in my generation thought that creating a poem, a painting, a story, was the most important and meaningful work a human being could do and all else paled behind the excitement of the creative life. Remember, we had been disappointed in the hope of political salvation. We had been devastated by the Holocaust and by the threat of atomic war. We held tightly to the belief that art was man's purpose and therefore the artist was the centre of our world. This romantic view seems absurd today, but if you think of a young girl devoting herself to a movie star today, you would understand how natural it seemed at the time.
Being Jewish, you carried the spectre of Auschwitz with you, and it is present in the book. But why did this spectre not make you realistic rather than romantic?
This is an interesting question and I'm not sure I have the answer. However, it is hard if not unnatural to feel unredeemed despair about life when you are 19 and it seems that seeking redemption in art, which is, after all, never sentimental, is a reasonable effort to make sense of the world. Of course, there are also personal reasons for my romantic love affair with art and artists that have to do with my own story and emotional landscape.
Your daughter Katie Roiphe wonders in her foreword: "What did it mean to have children of these different men?" What is your response?
I have no idea what it means. I do know that I am grateful to have had all three of my biological children and my stepdaughter. If it took two men to bring them into the world, so be it.
You write: "Artists and writers and their molls don't decay. They explode, perhaps, which is much better." What's the distinction between metaphorical decaying and exploding, and why is the latter better?
I think this statement was about the fear of measuring your life in teaspoons, the fear of the deadly dull, the lonely grey flannel suit, the commuter deadness of soul that lay behind us in the fifties. Decay is quiet but ghastly, explosion is dramatic and dreadful. There's not much to choose between the two of them in reality, and most of our lives have sufficient of both.
At one point in 1964, you think about finding a better life for yourself and your daughter by Jack Richardson by moving from New York, but you do not move. How do you explain this Chekhovian inertia?
Why didn't I move when I might have? My God, have you done everything that crossed your mind in your life? I had no money. I had friends in New York. I might have had the courage to go to somewhere far away, maybe a beach atoll. But, like most people, I put one foot in front of another and then I fell in love with someone with a doctor's office just a few blocks away and I never moved to that beach of my dreams. I wouldn't call the situation Chekhovian because I did move on in my life. I loved, I had more children, I worked and found a rewarding profession of my own. That is movement - just not geographic, which I think is the least interesting trip of all.
Several relationships with psychoanalysts or psychologists mark your life. One was with a psychoanalyst who killed himself; another was with a divorced father who was friends with painters and actors; another was with an impotent psychologist; and, of course, the best was with Dr. Roiphe, your husband for many years. Did you recognize at the time any significance to your attraction to psychoanalysts?
I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds..
Psychoanalysis is a mixture of science and art. My husband believed it was more art than science and, of course, that attracted me. I also explore beneath the surface when I can. Mental spelunking is not just a sport for me, it is a lifeline. Also, I think I prefer the conversation and company of psychoanalysts to that of hedge-fund managers, which makes for a less solvent old age but a more honest life. However, I understand that someone else could have the reverse preferences. Someone is interested in religion and its practice and someone is interested in archeology and on and on. If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.
In summing up your first husband, Jack Richardson, you blame his disorders on genetics. Is this a verdict on the struggle between nature and nurture?
I have no final verdict of the nature-nurture question.. In the fifties, we thought all was nurture (think of Bruno Bettelheim and the autism-producing mother) and only gradually have we garnered a healthy respect for genetics. I imagine most of us are the product of some mixture of both and some of us are lucky in our fate and some of us are not.
You tend to be rather sketchy about your first husband as a playwright. You do not mention the title of the Broadway play that flopped with Alfred Drake. Nor do you go into its subject that was about moral choice.
Ah, too much or too little about my first husband; you can choose your complaint. I wrote what I thought was necessary to make that time in my life become real on the page for the reader. Perhaps more would have been better, perhaps less. I was not writing his obituary or my own. I was not writing a critical piece on his work or my own. I was telling a story.
Can art redeem the damage to the women and their children? And do you feel that it has in your own case and with your children?
Art has many fine uses but redemption is not one of them. That was the false idea I once had. You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.