Philip roth, p.48
Philip Roth, page 48
That the rain falls on the just and unjust alike would become a crucial theme in Roth’s work—that life merely happens to people, regardless of their moral character one way or the other. He toyed, for instance, with titling his American Trilogy “Blindsided,” given that tragedy befalls his heroes—Swede Levov, Ira Ringold, and Coleman Silk—regardless of their efforts to lead, by their own lights, more or less admirable lives; Roth mocked readers who thought the three were being “punished” for their incidental flaws. “No, a man’s character isn’t his fate,” “Roth” reflects in Operation Shylock; “a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his character.” Of course, it was one thing for Roth to dismiss character as a factor in shameful defeats such as his first marriage, another when he considered how he’d managed withal to become one of the greatest writers of his era. “Yes, character is destiny,” he synthesized, in one of his final interviews, in 2014, “and yet everything is chance”—character matters, then, when it results in thirty-one published books, but chance is foremost when it comes to personal disaster. Roth’s main fictional alter ego, meanwhile, wasn’t buying it, at least where Maggie was concerned: “[Maggie] isn’t something that merely happened to you,” Zuckerman chides Roth at the end of The Facts, “she’s something that you made happen.”
Another accident that ensued from My Life as a Man was the enduring perception, in certain quarters, that Roth was a misogynist. “There are usually two sorts of women in Roth’s heroes’ lives,” Dickstein wrote, not altogether unjustly: “bitchy, castrating women who attract and destroy them, and doting sexual slaves who eventually bore them.” Since Roth claimed to have read only the one review—Broyard’s in Budapest—he had to take his friends’ words for it that he’d been tagged a “woman-hater” by certain “male critics who would please the feminist-militants,” as he wrote Tom Maschler, “(I don’t know how else to describe the people I mean).” Of course, there had been rumblings among these socalled militants over aspects of his previous novels, too—Lucy Nelson, the Monkey, Portnoy’s mother, Ty Cobb’s fondness (both in real life and in The Great American Novel) for the term “slits”—which might explain why Roth was so phobic about reading reviews of My Life as a Man. That a backlash was afoot among the “militants” was manifest in the information that Oates had noticed a “distinct dis-interest” on the part of “a well-known women’s magazine” when she’d offered to write a “generally ‘positive’ ” review of Roth’s latest. Oates could grasp, after all, that he was “dealing with a woman who is a criminal” and simply letting the chips fall where they may; besides, would a “male chauvinist pig” (as Roth heard himself described for the first time on an FM radio station in 1972) have created such characters as Brenda Patimkin, Libby Herz, and Martha Reganhart? For that matter, what about the Ann Mudge character in My Life as a Man?—“lovely Susan,” as Roth would have it, or, per contra, the ultimate embodiment of Dickstein’s “doting sexual slaves.” “Our knowledge of and opinions about Maggie and Ann and you prevent us from seeing the characters clearly,” his friends George and Mary Emma Elliott wrote after reading the novel. “For example, we just plain liked Maggie in Iowa City for all sorts of good reasons which don’t get into the novel at all, and we neither one ever liked Ann much, though she seems likable enough in her fictional avatar.” Which suggests Roth overdid the repellent in this version of Maggie, and definitely helps to explain why he fell out of touch with the Elliotts after 1974.
There were two types of censure that Roth was unable to forgive or at least forget: a vicious anti-Semitic slur, and any suggestion, however playful, that he didn’t like women. By 1970, Bob Brustein was dean of the Yale School of Drama, and Roth’s old friend from Iowa, Howard Stein, was associate dean, and both were present at a New Haven dinner party where Norma Brustein—“a woman whose very favorite public performance was in the role of the dizzy dame whose beguiling charm is her reckless and impudent ‘candor,’ ” as Roth wrote of her fictional counterpart, Deborah Schonbrunn, in The Professor of Desire—described Roth as a “killer of women.” Howard Stein (who owed his present position to Roth’s recommendation) relayed the remark to its target, who was naturally furious, all the more given that Ann Mudge had attempted suicide the year before. According to her husband, Norma was unaware of the Mudge episode, and was referring only to Roth’s hard feelings over his first marriage, which she found everywhere in his fiction and in his determination never to marry again. When Bob tried to explain as much, Roth was decidedly unappeased, and Norma—who adored Roth—wrote a rather-too-kittenish letter of apology: “I’ll loan Danny [her son] to you for a year if you tell me the name of the person” who turned her in, she said, before proceeding to assure him of her undying love, etc.† Roth rejected the apology as unserious, whereupon Bob wrote (as he recalled), “Philip, short of divorcing my wife and putting my children out for adoption, I don’t know what’s going to satisfy you.” An “armed truce” (in Brustein’s words) ensued for a couple of years: Roth affected to let bygones be bygones and resumed being friendly, if a bit more distant, until Norma’s sudden death in 1979. “She’s just a gossip,” he observed in 2012. “These gossips, these well-poisoners, these unwell-wishers. Schadenfreude friends.”
AFTER NEARLY SIX YEARS together, Roth professed to be happy with Barbara Sproul, if disinclined as ever to marry and have children. The closest thing they had to a child was Sproul’s fat Siamese, Ying, who played a game with Roth whereby she tried running around him, her baggy nether parts fishtailing this way and that on the polished floor. “Tell ’em about Ying,” Roth would say, alluding to the way Sproul sometimes liked to tell cat stories; it was his way of letting her know she’d “crossed the line into deeply boring.”
One Monday morning in October 1974, Roth and Sproul were heading back to New York from Connecticut, and Roth mentioned in passing that he was thinking about going to London “for six to eight weeks” in the spring—alone, it was understood, since she had to teach her classes at Hunter (where she was now a religion professor) and he was taking the semester off at Penn. That’s fine, said Sproul, but when he returned it would be time for them to get married and have a child. (“I remember [Barbara] saying to me,” said Rose Styron, “ ‘If he doesn’t marry me by my thirtieth birthday, I’m leaving.’ ”) Roth tried to remonstrate, but Sproul was firm, abruptly ending the conversation in his living room on Eighty-first Street: “This would be a really good time to split up,” she announced. “Because I really want kids and you don’t, and that’s not going to change. So why don’t you go to London and I’ll stay here and this has been wonderful.” And she got up and left.
At first Roth was mostly fine: “I’m sad,” he wrote a friend, “but I’m not depressed or demoralized.” That changed a few days later, when Roth awoke so paralyzed with malaise he had to drag himself out of bed and crawl to the bathroom. What he later described as a nervous breakdown left him so “focusless, fearful, bereft” that he could hardly walk the streets and was frightened by his appearance in the mirror (“Empty eyes, a pale face”). A friend invited him to come along for a weekend visit in Connecticut with Robert Penn Warren and his wife, Eleanor Clark, and Roth jumped at the distraction, especially given the presence of their Yalie daughter, Rosanna. During a walk in the woods with his hosts, however, Roth’s legs froze and he had to sit down. Finally, mortified, he was able to hobble back to the house.
Sproul had planted a gorgeous array of flowers along the old stone walls that ran on either side of Roth’s studio in Connecticut, and, before moving out that fall, she added tulip bulbs that would bloom in the spring. In April it came to pass, and Roth was so overcome he confided his misery to Francine Gray, of all people, brokenly commending his “lovely and generous” ex-helpmate for the gesture. (“Actually,” said Sproul, “that would have been arrogance and pride on my part.”) Meanwhile the phlox and foxglove and so forth hadn’t bloomed yet, and a “dumb lug” of a gardener routed them as weeds. Roth wept over the loss, as he confessed to a friend, “since it seemed that life, with its heavy-handed irony, was only confirming that so much that Barbara and I had built together was being torn apart limb by limb, root by root, etc. These have been emotional times. It doesn’t take much to send me tumbling.”
He and Sproul continued to meet for dinner now and then, and in June 1975 he gave her a thirtieth birthday party at Ballato’s. Sproul was more than willing to be tender pals, but when Roth tried coaxing her back with promises to “think about” marriage and children, she steadily refused; at least twice they had to use Kleinschmidt as a mediator. Meanwhile she gave herself two years to “fool around”—dating the likes of the activist clergyman William Sloane Coffin and Joseph Brodsky—before marrying the playwright Herb Gardner (A Thousand Clowns), with whom she lived happily, with children, until his death in 2003. “Give my regards to the blueberry bushes,” she wrote Roth in 2002, “the wild bee balm, the mock orange bush, the Father Hugo rose which should be in bloom off the stone room just about now. . . . They are all a part of my heart as are, most dearly, you.”
IN 1975, Aaron Asher left Holt to become editor in chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Roth decided to follow his friend and add his name to that prestigious house’s list of great Jewish writers, including Singer and Malamud. Publisher Roger Straus considered the deal a “holding operation”: Roth’s first book for FSG would be a collection of essays and interviews, Reading Myself and Others, and Straus considered it little better than a vanity project, which they were willing to subsidize while looking forward to Roth’s next novel.
If anything, the book sold even more poorly than Straus expected, and was ignored by almost every major reviewer except the Times, which produced the usual dutiful pans. This time Broyard made explicit reference to his 1970 meeting with Roth, who, he wrote, had been coming from the dentist when the two agreed to sit down for coffee; thus, with this book, Roth was “again coming from the dentist,” and wondering if fame was “a diet that rots the teeth.” In any case Broyard congratulated Roth—“a talented critic,” he allowed—for his courage in leaving himself “wide open” by publishing such a hodgepodge. The kind of haymaker Broyard envisaged was delivered by Roger Sale in the Book Review: noting how Roth had suffered, in recent years, because he (Roth) and others had come to consider him “a major talent” instead of “an excellent minor genius” (a nice distinction), Sale reported that the present book “confirms all gloomy suspicions”; its reprinted interviews were “embarrassing in their assurance that anything Roth does is worth his and our closest scrutiny,” while the essays were mostly forgettable.
In his everyday life, at least, Roth was strenuously cultivating anonymity. While in New York he often ate dinner at a cheap Hungarian cafeteria in Yorkville, Eva’s, where two sisters stood behind a counter serving chicken paprikash and the like. Roth loved the place: “I didn’t have to make a reservation; I didn’t have to spend a hundred dollars; I didn’t have to change my clothes.” Best of all, almost nobody knew he was the author of Portnoy’s Complaint. One of the few exceptions was a twenty-five-year-old paralegal named Nancy, who was dining with a friend when she spotted Roth, alone, at another table. That time she only stopped for a brief chat, but the following week she went back and found him again, and this time they had dinner together.
A fling ensued that was fun while it lasted. Nancy was from “l’école de hard knocks,” said Roth, who admired the long, difficult path she took to become a lawyer—that is, she was sponsored by her firm to “read the law” in lieu of attending law school, which she couldn’t afford, and eventually passed the bar exam. “Your writing drives me crazy!” she told Roth in the meantime, yanking handfuls of paperbacks from under her bed in a moment of postcoital hilarity. “I’m reading every one of these goddamn books!” She found Roth easy company (“he never really hit a false note”), happy to field questions as to whether this or that scene or detail from a novel was “true.” Then one day, amicably enough, he told her it was time for them to part. “I think he just lost interest,” said Nancy, who “got that,” despite feeling disappointed.
By then he was caught up in a far more complicated affair—“a typhoon”—with a new upstairs neighbor on Eighty-first Street, Janet Fraser, whose husband Nick had taken a job in the city with Newsweek. Janet was a twenty-six-year-old writer who’d recently finished her first book, Everybody Who Was Anybody, about Gertrude Stein, which she published under her maiden name, Hobhouse. At first Roth thought she was English because of her accent, though in fact she was born in Manhattan to an American mother and English father, attending the Spence School before going abroad to get her bachelor’s degree at Oxford. “A selling point for his damn building,” said Roth, when she mentioned how the landlord had pointed out his mailbox while showing the Frasers around. The next time Roth contrived to be in the downstairs foyer so he could bump into the tall, stylish young woman, he asked her to have coffee. As Hobhouse remembered in her posthumous roman à clef, The Furies,‡ Roth was “the soul of correctness” but “unnervingly scrutinizing,” and she was very conscious of being sixteen years younger while trying wittily to answer questions about her life and plans in New York.
Roth was “lonely as hell” at the time, but wary about getting involved with a married young woman—no matter how fetching and clever—who was “tremendously high-strung” and living in the same building to boot. They’d been platonically meeting for weeks when her husband left town on a lengthy assignment, at which point Roth became flirtatious in earnest—a phenomenon memorably described in The Furies:
Once Jack [Roth] set out to charm you, there was not much you could do about it. . . . He liked talk to be like Ping-Pong, but he also liked to take the stage himself and perform. He was a brilliant mimic, and he would incorporate into his descriptions of friends, the unknown and the famous, whole chunks of reincarnation, by the subtlest shifts of body position as well as speech. What he noticed about people was unnervingly sharp, merciless, they were as though caught in the beams of a pagan god, for whom acceptance, forgiveness, was soft and unnecessary stuff.
Eventually they slept together, and for many mornings thereafter, once her husband had left for the day, Hobhouse would take the elevator—their “deus ex machina”—down to Roth’s apartment and lounge around his living room while he worked. Nick Fraser traveled a lot, and in his absence Roth tended to eat dinner with Hobhouse upstairs; otherwise he’d take her to the drab Hungarian/Czech joints in Yorkville where he felt most at ease because unlikely to be detected. “Where is that boredom I ran from?” he wrote a little plaintively to a friend.
He began to worry about her recklessness. She would arrive barefoot from the elevator, or greet him exuberantly on the street, and meanwhile Roth suspected (correctly) that her husband had more than an inkling of what was going on. “I don’t want to be the thing that you do,” he told Hobhouse, who was adrift in her work and so even more inclined to invest herself in their affair. One day, however, she put a foot irretrievably wrong, remarking that an overzealous therapist had decided she was manic-depressive and given her lithium. Roth found the diagnosis all too plausible, and wanted to think he was finished forever with unstable romantic partners. “I loved, and in the end even relied on, this old-maidish Prufrockery of his,” Hobhouse wrote in The Furies. “He withdrew himself from my life as politely and agilely as he knew how (and he had had years of practice at such affable-seeming but rock-hard withdrawal). After a while when I saw him again, he said that he was with someone else, asked about [Nick] and advised us to think about having children before too long.”
ON APRIL 3, 1975, Roth returned to Prague with Mel Tumin, whom Sproul had recruited as a companion for her ex-boyfriend, a nervous traveler at the best of times. “Everything is the same, except more so,” Roth reported to her. “Alas.” Klíma took Roth around to visit nine of the fifteen benefactees of his Ad Hoc Fund, which had boosted morale, a little, amid “increasingly cruel and hopeless” conditions. The authorities had conspired to make menial jobs even more obnoxious, for dissidents, by forcing them to work long hours away from home, living in cramped trailers with crude plumbing and kitchen facilities. Seven years of oppression, since the invasion, had begun to have the desired (for the regime) results. At least three eminent Czech writers—Miroslav Holub, Bohumil Hrabal, and Jiří Šotola—had decided to reclaim full citizenship by publicly confessing their “mistakes.”
On his return to the States, without naming sources, Roth would give a full account of such “Stalin-era methods” to The Washington Post (“Prague Presses Dissidents”). Meanwhile the Czech government had begun to take menacing notice of his fondness for proscribed writers. He and his friends were followed around Prague by the secret police, who sat at adjacent tables in restaurants with their ears cocked (“thereby having learned something, I hope, about contemporary American literature and old Jewish jokes,” Roth noted). One day, as he returned from a risibly awful exhibition of Soviet art, two uniformed policemen stopped Roth on the street and demanded his papers (passport, visa, hotel card). After a perfunctory examination they indicated he was to come with them, but Roth refused; when one tried to grab him, he yelled in English and broken French at pedestrians waiting for a trolley: he was an American, Philip Roth, and if the police arrested him they should report it to the American embassy. One of the cops drifted up the street to confer with a plainclothesman, and Roth broke away and jumped onto a passing trolley. Crisscrossing the city for a while, he finally dismounted at a telephone kiosk and called Klíma. “Philip, they were trying to frighten you,” he laughed, advising Roth to return to his hotel and “carry on normally.” But Roth, quite successfully frightened, decided to cut short his trip (including five days in “muddy Poland”) and return to New York immediately.
