Philip Roth's friendship with Earl Axman and their escapades

Philip Roth’s friendship with Earl Axman turns a shared interest in stamps into a partnership in clandestine adventure. After Philip’s father breaks down over Alvin Roth’s injury and the household’s routines change, Earl becomes his after-school companion and guide to rule-breaking: together they steal money, ride buses beyond Newark, and follow Christian men home. Their excursions give Philip a secret world of movement and choice, but also expose how closely his desire to escape is bound to fear, family upheaval, and the political menace he imagines around him.

Formation and Circumstances

Philip begins spending nearly all his after-school hours with Earl after watching his father collapse into grief. His mother is away at work at Hahne's, and Sandy Roth works after school for Lindbergh; Philip, with little homework and only the task of setting the dinner table, finds himself largely unsupervised. Stamp collecting remains the friendship’s starting point: Philip has been Earl’s apprentice in the hobby, and he visits to examine the collection through a magnifying glass. Their time together also includes furtive exploration of Earl’s mother’s bureau and its contents.

Earl is nearly two years older than Philip. His parents are divorced, and his mother is often away at a beauty parlor or shopping in New York City. Philip sees Earl as someone who has not tried to be a model child, a contrast that appeals to a boy increasingly resentful of his own juvenile goodness. The phrase Philip privately repeats in bed, “Now let's do something awful,” captures the friendship’s turn: Earl’s suggestions promise a transgression that feels thrilling precisely because Philip has been trying to please everyone.

Following Strangers

Earl has already developed a method for following men. After school, he travels downtown alone, waits near bus stops, boards behind a man going home from work, and follows him from the bus to his house while keeping his distance. He tells Philip that the point is to discover where people live, and that he sometimes travels beyond Newark. Getting home before his mother is part of the challenge. Bus fares come from money Earl steals from his mother’s handbags; when visiting his father in New York, he takes cash from suits in the closet and from the coats of musicians who come over to play poker.

Philip joins him in this practice and finds that the rule-breaking becomes easier with repetition. Their targets are adult Christian men who work downtown: they do not follow women or people they think are Jewish, whom Earl says do not interest him. Their routes take them to Pennsylvania Station, Broad and Market, and the courthouse bus stop. The object is not to enter the houses or confront the men. At the end of a pursuit, they watch from a distance as the man opens his door and disappears inside; Earl may comment on a large lawn, screens on the windows, or a new Pontiac in the garage. He will not let the adventure extend to peering through the windows, which he considers beyond even his own limits.

The journeys unsettle Philip as much as they exhilarate him. Paying the stolen fare means boarding a bus to a destination he does not know, and the whispered name of each neighborhood can leave him feeling lost. He imagines hunger, arrest, attack by dogs, adoption by a Christian stranger, or being kidnapped like Charles Lindbergh Jr. He also turns the excursions into a fantasy of flight from a larger catastrophe: in his mind, Lindbergh may have connived with Hitler to bring an invasion to America, and the boys may be fleeing the Nazis. The actual pursuit is a childhood escapade; the imagined danger gives it the scale of escape from a country and family that seem to be slipping away.

A Secret World of Motion

The boys’ routines depend on concealment and movement. They turn corners, cross streets, and crouch behind trees, then return downtown on a bus that can be nearly empty as workers leave for home. From Pennsylvania Station they catch the number 14 bus home, making their return trip another leg of the day’s covert travel. Earl’s confidence and Philip’s nervousness form a visible contrast: on an empty bus Earl sprawls across the rear seat, while Philip sits beside him, lean and bony, wearing the self-conscious smile of a sidekick. Their private sense of daring temporarily reverses the ordinary roles of the child and the adult world they watch.

The secret has a physical afterlife at home. At dinner Philip thinks about having followed a stranger without anyone knowing, and his agitation makes his knee jiggle beneath the table. He begins to understand escape not simply as a route to a particular place but as an aim in itself. When he hears a bus climbing Chancellor Avenue hill from school, he thinks of being aboard it; the outside world has become an instrument of flight. The friendship thus joins a practical game of bus routes and stolen fares to Philip’s growing wish to get beyond the limits set by family, neighborhood, and childhood.

The Last Excursion and Separation

The boys’ outings continue from late October through November and into December, as the weather grows colder. Their final trip takes place a few days before Christmas vacation. They board the Linden bus behind a man carrying two department-store bags full of gifts, decorated in red and green, and follow him across the Hillside line into Elizabeth. The boys’ winter coats, mittens, corduroy trousers, and rubber galoshes make them look like ordinary local schoolchildren, but the darkening evening and their confidence in their own stealth do not keep them from being noticed.

The man realizes that the boys are following him and calls to them in a friendly voice. He offers cocoa, spice cake, seed cake, gingerbread men, animal crackers, and marshmallows. When Philip looks to Earl for a response, Earl is already heading back toward Newark. He calls, “Run for it,” and identifies the man as “a fairy.” The invitation turns the familiar pursuit into an encounter the boys cannot control; their established partnership ends, in the moment, with Earl choosing flight and Philip left to respond to the situation himself.

Earl’s departure from Philip’s life follows soon after. Ten days after that final outing, Earl’s mother suffers a nervous breakdown and is taken away in an ambulance in the middle of the night. On New Year’s Day 1942, Earl’s father takes him away, stamp collection and all. Later in January a mover’s truck removes the household furnishings, including the bureau that had been part of the boys’ furtive explorations, and the Axmans are not seen again on Summit Avenue.

Narrative Significance

The friendship makes Philip’s wish to escape concrete: it is measured in bus fares, unfamiliar neighborhoods, the turn of a corner, and the distance from a watched man’s front door. Its apparently comic rituals—stealing change, inventing cover, and riding home unnoticed—unfold beside Philip’s fear that the country itself may become unsafe. The boys’ pursuit of Christian men is also shaped by the distinctions they make about whom they will follow, placing their curiosity within the social boundaries of their Newark neighborhood.

Earl offers Philip a model of disobedience and a companion in imagining that the world extends beyond home, but the friendship cannot guarantee safety or permanence. The final invitation breaks the game’s terms, and the rapid sequence of Earl’s mother’s illness, his removal, and the emptied house converts a recurring after-school adventure into a vanished world. What remains is Philip’s memory of a secret alliance that taught him both the exhilaration of getting away and the uncertainty of whether a companion would stay beside him when the imagined danger became immediate.