A Spooky Lonely Wooded Retreat

One of the best reasons to stay locked into Philip Roth’s world – his books, the complexities, the ups and downs of humanity -- is that you’ll always be just around the corner from a new feeling, an understanding.

That happened again this week reading Roth’s essay, “Juice or Gravy? How I Met my Fate in a Cafeteria,” for our next Philip Roth Book Club meeting with Professor James Duban on Saturday, Dec 2. We were caught on an early paragraph helping to set the scene for what we’ll see happening in the cafeteria. Roth wrote this essay which was used as an afterword to the 25th edition of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1994.

Roth is looking back to when he was 23 years old in 1956 and still “the aggressively independent son of energetic parents,” having obtained his Masters of Arts at the University of Chicago and next setting out to complete his service in the Army. An accidental injury would occur causing great pain that at different levels would be with Roth all of his life.

Here’s the paragraph:

The circumstances of my Army discharge should perhaps have alerted me to just how little one has to do with calling the shots that determine the ways in which a life develops. Though I'd gone into the Army, under the post-Korean War draft, assuming that I would be serving a two-year stint, I was released halfway through because of an injury incurred in basic training that had increasingly disabled me over the ensuing months. When I was in too much pain even to perform my Washington desk job, I was sent to the Army's gloomy rehabilitation center nearby, a spooky, lonely wooded retreat in Forest Glen, Md., where the other patients on my ward were mostly amputees and paraplegics. Their miseries drastically dwarfed my own, and many nights I would listen in the dark to someone my age or even younger crying aloud from his bed that this wasn't supposed to have happened to him. Eventually I was discharged for medical reasons, but still without having figured out, even after having lived and slept for over a month among the youthful victims of the most unlikely misfortunes, that orderly expectations and a rational outlook are as great a fantasy as anything cooked up in the roiling brain of a paranoid schizophrenic.

Roth conveys that feeling of solitary pain and immobility not just for himself but especially for others, his fellow patients in the woods that night. We feel it and want life to be different.

After his recovery and discharge, Roth returned to Chicago to begin teaching where he was rather quickly drawn to Margaret “Maggie” Martinson, who had so far led a tumultuous life, but claimed, he wrote, “to know everything there was about the unfairness of life.”

Please join us at the Philip Roth Book Club meeting on December 2, 2023. James Duban is a Professor of English at the University of North Texas.

-Nancy Shields