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

minute coterie, for its members would have found in my fiction a very soft satiric target. Then again, if there had been some sort of worthy competition around, I might not have produced these unconscious personal allegories to begin with. Allegorical representation is what they were—the result of having found myself far more of a cuckoo in the Bucknell nest than I’d been even as an adolescent on Leslie Street, let alone at Newark Rutgers, where, as a lower-middle-class boy from an ambitious minority in pursuit of a better life, I’d briefly played out the postimmigrant romance of higher education.
    I don’t believe I ever found myself out of place just because I was a Jew, though I was not unaware, especially when I was still fresh from home, that I was a Jew at a university where the bylaws stipulated that more than half the Board of Trustees had to be members of the Baptist Church, where chapel attendance was required of lowerclassmen, and where the one extracurricular organization for which most Bucknellians seemed to have membership cards was the Christian Association. But then, after only a little while in SAM I felt no closer to my fraternity brothers than I had to those Christian Association members who had lived in my dormitory and spent a part of each evening playing touch football in the corridor outside the room where I was concocting the symbols for my stories of victimized refinement. Like the overprotected young victims in those first short stories, who stood for something like the life of the mind, I was turning out to be too sensitive, though not to religious so much as to spiritual differences at a university where the dominant tone seemed to emanate from the large undergraduate population enrolled in the commerce-and-finance program—students preparing to take ordinary workaday jobs in the booming postwar business world, which not only my literary ideals but also my loosely held suspicion of the profit motive had pitted me against since I’d begun to read the New York paper P.M., when I was fourteen. The courses to which I was drawn typified everything that the marketplace deemed worthless, and yet here I was, living among its most enthusiastic adherents—the unrebellious sons and daughters of status-quo America at the dawn of the Eisenhower era—certain that mind and not money was what gave life meaning, and studying, in dead earnest, Literary Criticism, Modern Thought, Advanced Shakespeare, and Aesthetics.
    In September of 1952, when, as juniors, I took over as editor in chief of Et Cetera and Pete Tasch as managing editor, the Maurers became our advisers. Bob was listed as an official literary adviser, and Charlotte became an unofficial adviser. Her influence on the opening pages of each issue would have been apparent to anyone familiar with the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.” Our own “Talk of the Town” was a two-page miscellany of putatively witty reportage, called “Transit Lines,” a heading we thought nicely appropriate on a campus where an engineering student was always out on one of the walkways sighting through a telescope. Stories began in the first person plural, invariably with a tone of droll breeziness that the editor considered urbane: “When we heard about the new dormitory inspection policy (men living on The Hill will have their rooms inspected every week by the ROTC department) we were prepared to see, lining the campus, signs screaming, ‘Down with the Military’ or ‘Keep the Fascista from Our Rooms!…’” “The other day we purchased a genuine undyed mouton pelt for the ridiculously low sum of five dollars.…” “One of our friends, a sociology major, if you’re interested, told us a story the other afternoon. It seems that he took the afternoon train out of New York on Sunday.…” Some pieces were deft and readable, others oozed with archness, and none accorded with Cummings’s prescription for a magazine “fearlessly obscene.”
    The obscenity