Last week I reported that in 1929 William Empson was expelled and expunged from Cambridge University for owning a condom, a circumstance that I judged to be an scandalous instance of ancient prudery. But in thanks to one of those fascinating moments of cultural convergence, I've just re-read, after almost fifty years, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, which also turns on a discovered contraceptive -- in the latter case, a diaphragm. Readers of the novella will remember that Roth's Newark alter ago, Neil Klugman, enjoys a summer romance with rich 'Cliffie Brenda Patimkin and pressures her to obtain a pessary. In due time the incriminating object is discovered by Brenda's protective, overbearing mother. Shock and outrage ensues, and the romance founders.
When I read about the Empson-Cambridge contraceptive scandal, I felt as though I was entering an alien, distant and incomprehensible past. But Goodbye Columbus appeared in 1959, when I was an undergraduate at Cornell -- and is therefore very much a part of my conscious lifetime. Nor is Roth inaccurate about 50s sexual prudery. Contraceptives were difficult to obtain (even for married folk) and pre-marital sex was still taboo -- though, I must say, a taboo honored more in the breach than the observance. The old ways were slowly changing. In 1958, I participated in my first political demonstration -- or riot -- when Cornell authorities tried to prohibit women from visiting men's off-campus apartments. We staged a late-night moderately out-of-control protest march to the president's office. It was an all-male event because after 11 pm, women were confined to their all-female dormitories.(The action is recorded in Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me [1966]). It all seems so positively quaint now -- the university trying to police our sexual life and all that. Parents nowadays, at least the parents that I know, would be delighted to learn that their college-age daughters are using contraceptives.
In Goodbye, Columbus, Neil Klugman accuses Brenda of allowing her diaphragm to be discovered so that she can end the uneasy romance. Neil's argument seemed rational in 1959, but it no longer does so. From the vantage of 2007, it's clear that the many Roth alter egos have consistently been able to find justifications and excuses to end both their affairs and their marriages. Klugman, and Kepesh, and Zuckerman are never, ever, going to be more than momentarily and intermittently loyal or satisfied, but on the whole it's going to be circumstances, not their own volition, which causes them to flee. We didn't know that then. In 1959, Goodbye, Columbus seemed like a disinterested clearing of the Victorian air; now it has been transformed into a overture to Roth's long and tormented psychosexual opera.
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