Here are some highlights from this new book by Blake Bailey:
* Wolfe was the catalyst for Roth’s ambition to become an artist of titanic appetites—geographic, intellectual, sexual.
* He also lifted weights, he said, so he could become strong enough to get a girl “to put her hand on [his] cock.” As he evoked the era sixty-two years later, “The erections of 1950 were exactly the same as the erections of 2012, but the erections of 1950 had nowhere to go.” Reflecting on the bygone phenomenon of blue balls (“no kid knows what they are anymore”), he described nights on a porch glider with the petite Elaine Goldberg, toward whom he exerted a “monumental” tenacity, to little avail. “Bent over like a cripple” afterward, he’d limp as far as a clump of bushes near the high school, “savagely beating off” to ease the pain, then proceed to Syd’s and sit down with Stu Lehman or one of the others. ( “You got the blue balls?” “Yeah.” ) Another erotic milestone for the boys was the time they lied about their age to get into the Little Theatre, on Broad Street, and see Hedy Lamarr run naked through the woods in Ecstasy ( “ This is it! ” they whispered, jostling one another as the scene approached). There was also the Empire Burlesque, where Roth would sometimes claim to have been a virtual regular (“ I spent many Sunday afternoons there ,” he said in 1958), though later he recalled a single anticlimactic visit around the age of fifteen, when he ruefully learned that seedy comedians outnumbered the women in G-strings. *
Perhaps the closest Roth and his friends came to sex were necking parties in Heyman’s finished basement—“the most beautiful word in the English language,” as Roth liked to say (he also insisted it was one word: “finishedbasement”). Daytime they’d while away the hours playing Ping-Pong and telling jokes; at night they’d bring dates and dance to Billy Eckstine records (“while pressing your groin as hard as possible into the groin of your sweet young partner”). Roth’s main date that first year out of high school was Joan Bressler, who’d been two years above him at Weequahic and now attended teachers’ college in New York. A relatively sophisticated young woman, Bressler introduced him to contemporary fiction in the form of her favorite author, Truman Capote, whose work he read with a certain deference at the time. Six decades later, though, Joan Bressler Greenspan (by then a widow living in River Edge, New Jersey) received a letter from her old boyfriend setting her straight on that point: “Capote and I got to know and dislike each other in the sixties, and I liked seeing him skewered in that movie about him. An unpleasant and a limited writer.”
* Of the three gay men Roth thinks he encountered at Bucknell, one was the art teacher and the other two were among his first three roommates, all Jews. One would become a friend of Roth through their participation in the drama society, Cap and Dagger; Roth later heard this man had come out of the closet after some thirty years of marriage with children. Another shared a bunk with Roth, a boy named Dick who would serve as the model for the insufferable Flusser in Indignation.
* While Roth (still pre-law) spent almost every night in the library until it closed, the goyim of Bucknell were “getting drunk, getting pinned, [and] not studying”; also they liked cooling their heels at the movies, whereas Roth figured he saw maybe two movies during his entire time in Lewisburg. Ten years later, as one of the country’s leading young Jewish intellectuals, Roth would opine for a Commentary symposium that Jews of his generation were united not by “ a complex of values or aspirations or beliefs” but rather by a “powerful disbelief”—to wit, “the rejection of the myth of Jesus as Christ.” Thus, an especially hateful requirement, at Bucknell, had been weekly chapel attendance during which Roth would sit dourly reading Schopenhauer. “ I felt like a Houyhnhnm who had strayed on to campus from Gulliver’s Travels .”
* At first his passion for learning was more promiscuous than ever. He’d found his constitutional law class so engrossing that he’d accepted an invitation to spend a semester at American University in Washington, Washington, D.C.—but then became enthralled with his world literature class and decided to double-major in English and political science, and finally dropped pre-law altogether.
* The episode that ended things took place at the local cemetery, a traditional trysting spot, where Roth had driven Sides in his roommate Ned Miller’s car: “to my astonishment and hers,” Roth remembered, “she performed fellatio.” Roth claimed this was nothing he wanted or expected (though he thought he might have taken his penis out, in hope of a hand job)—indeed, all he knew about such an act, he said, was that “whores did it”; in the moment he remembered thinking the girl’s parents must be divorced. Sides remembered things differently. “It wasn’t the least bit romantic,” she said, claiming Roth had put a hand on the back of her head: “I think it was more of an encouragement, not coercive, but I didn’t know how to politely withdraw.” It may have been so, given that Roth would concede more than once, in all apparent innocence, that one had to “have an aggressive side” in those days to get anything in the way of sex: “I don’t mean nasty aggressive; I mean a forceful nature.”
Roth was seventy-six when he got back in touch with Sides, post- Indignation , inquiring with sincere curiosity what she’d made of the incident at the cemetery (a linchpin scene in the book). “I was surprised,” she wrote back, “—no, I was appalled. . . . I didn’t have any resources for dealing with it so I just cut you out of my life.” That was another thing they remembered differently: how it ended. Like Marcus in the novel, Roth recalled being unable to make sense of things and moreover suspecting there was “something a little broken” in Sides, so he kept his distance. Sides, in turn, had had similar feelings of remorse and confusion, but was quite certain she was the one who broke it off, when Roth called a couple of nights later to ask her out for another date. In fact she was so upset she phoned her father immediately afterward and told him about the breakup (though not what had led up to it). “Well, you don’t need to be dating a Jewish boy,” he said, betraying an anti-Semitism whereof she’d had no previous inkling.
“I feel very tenderly toward her,” Roth said, a few years before he was moved to contact Ann Sides Bishop. “If there were any reason to go to the reunion, it would be to see this seventy-two-year-old woman.” As it happened, Bishop had been “dining out on Philip Roth for years,” as she put it: her granddaughter had been a Ph.D. candidate at Penn a few years after Roth’s time as a celebrated faculty member, and the young woman was “lionized” when her colleagues learned that her grandmother had dated Roth.
* Roth’s celibacy was hardly for lack of trying. He and Haber were even willing to dance to Hebrew folk songs at a Hillel mixer in hope of enticing some hearty Zionist to bed, but dancing was as far as things went. Finally, one night at Jimmy’s, Roth “picked up [his] one and only black girl” (ever)—a light-skinned Roosevelt College student whose name enchanted him: Arizona McGill. Women were no more welcome at the Divinity House than at Mrs. Purnell’s, and Roth had to smuggle her into the basement. The two dated for a short while, and Roth never forgot his meeting with Arizona’s even lighter-skinned mother, who told him that certain relatives of hers were “ lost to all their people ”—that is, had decided to pass as white, “never to return,” a detail that would occur to Roth forty-four years later, while writing The Human Stain.
* While Roth moonlighted as a playwright, his friend Bob Silvers made him the New York Review of Books ’ “ hatchet man in the theater ,” as Roth put it—at any rate he wrote two long reviews in nine months that were memorable for their provocative disregard of whatever passed for political correctness in those days. Roth’s pleasant acquaintance with James Baldwin may have suffered as a result of his assessment of Blues for Mister Charlie :
It is soap opera designed to illustrate the superiority of black over whites. . . . They dance better. And they cook better. And their penises are longer, or stiffer. Indeed, so much that comprises the Southern stereotype of the Negro comes back through Negro mouths as testimony to their human superiority, that finally one is about ready to hear that the eating of watermelon increases one’s word power.
* “I hope to do for the fags this time what I did for the colored last,” Roth quipped about his second review, in February 1965, of Albee’s Tiny Alice. Despite his close friendships with gay men (especially later), Roth could be amazingly tasteless even by the norms of the era; with respect to Tiny Alice, however, he couldn’t abide the “galling sophistication” and “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of what was evidently meant to be an all but impenetrable allegory of gay life.
* In his book about the Portnoy phenomenon, Promiscuous , Roth’s friend Bernard Avishai provided this intriguing bit of trivia: “Item: The Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein told me that his childhood friend in Jerusalem imported pornographic films in the 1960s, and one of his biggest clients was—wait for it!—Gershom Scholem.”
* WHILE WRITING SABBATH, Roth refined his work routine with two crucial acquisitions: a stand-up desk, which spared his back a little and behooved him to walk around when he got stuck, and a word processor, which he found wonderfully conducive to revision and “ a bit more company than the typewriter ”—which is not to say he was tempted by the nascent internet. Almost ten years would pass before Roth bought a second computer for that purpose (and even longer before he bothered with email), and for the rest of his life he did most of his actual writing on the first, a Dell 466/L with a quaintly minuscule eight megabytes of RAM. “You’ve got a word processor!” Updike congratulated him. “Welcome to this wonderful world. You’ll be able to double your output, delighting your friends and confounding your foes.”
* One sign that he’d exhausted the pleasure of Sabbath’s company was his visceral reaction to the sight of Sabbath’s Theater on the bedside table of Julia Golier’s sweet Catholic mother: “I felt so ashamed ,” said Roth.
* A measure of Roth’s self-involvement, and/or a kind of selective naiveté, was his inability to grasp at the time that Bloom meant to do him harm.
* “You have already had Portnoy’s complaint,” Gore Vidal advised her [Claire Bloom] back in 1975, referring to her recent divorce from a man who’d exploited her sexually and otherwise, Hilly Elkins. “Do not involve herself with Portnoy.”
* Daphne Merkin, however, writing in The New Yorker , wondered at Bloom’s lack of “any sense of moral accountability. . . . In her own eyes, she remains forever a passive being fatally attracted to men who issue demonic commands she has no choice but to obey.” § As for Bloom’s alleged fairness despite her victimhood, Merkin noted that Roth and others had proved quite useful to her career: “One can discern, through the pious gloss Bloom puts on the events of her life, the shrewd maneuverings of a stage brat”—a sentiment Zoë Heller echoed more bluntly in the London Review of Books : “beneath the guise of a bashed butterfly, a scorpion.”
* Just as Roth, regarding his two marriages, sometimes liked to think he’d more or less accidentally stumbled into disastrous attachments with unstable women (“a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his character”), so Roth couldn’t abide the idea that Levov and his other tragic heroes are being “punished” for their human flaws; rather they’re random victims of history, and hence Roth’s notion to title his American Trilogy “Blindsided.”
* One of the very few critics Roth respected, Louis Menand, suggested in The New Yorker that what Swede is “blindsided by is the culture of liberal permissiveness,” and for this reason Menand predicted some readers would construe the novel as “a kind of recantation” by the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, “a swerve to the cultural right.” Lo and behold, Roth’s old nemesis Norman Podhoretz applauded “ a born-again Philip Roth . . . . Here, for once, it was the ordinary Jews of his childhood who were celebrated—for their decency, their sense of responsibility, their seriousness about their work, their patriotism—and here, for once, those who rejected and despised such virtues were shown to be either pathologically nihilistic or smug, self-righteous, and unimaginative.” But Roth himself wasn’t having any of it—or rather he was having it various ways, reflecting his own thoughtful ambivalence about things. Levov is nothing if not a decent, tolerant man, but he’s hardly the embodiment of a “permissive” culture; his behavior toward Merry is sweet but unyielding: throughout his sixty-seven (numbered as such) conversations about letting her go to New York alone, he sternly imposes conditions, such as staying with their friends the Umanoffs; when she disobeys, he places her “under house arrest,” while helpfully suggesting she “[b]ring the war home” by organizing the movement in Old Rimrock. Whereupon she blows up the general store.
* “You’re nothing but a shitty little capitalist who exploits the brown and yellow people of the world and lives in luxury behind the nigger-proof security gates of his mansion,” Rita Cohen taunts Levov, who produces (yet again) an insight of Rothian percipience: “The unreality of being in the hands of this child! . . . What was the whole sick enterprise other than angry, infantile egoism thinly disguised as identification with the oppressed?”
* “Alfred [Kazin] began an evening by asking how you were and three minutes later, having barely been able to endure your reply, he began his lecture on the French Revolution or the poetry of Hart Crane or Lincoln’s prose style.”
In 2011, Kazin’s journals were published by Yale University Press, and Roth learned how deeply one of his idols had loathed him. “Philip Roth, the male shrew” was a favorite epithet, referring (a little ironically, Roth thought) to the younger man’s tendency to monopolize conversations in a noisy, pompous way, so that Kazin was “always glad to see him depart in all his prosperity and self-satisfaction.”
* “Beware the utopia of isolation,” Murray Ringold warns Zuckerman toward the end of I Married a Communist . “Beware the utopia of the shack in the woods, the oasis defense against rage and grief. An impregnable solitude.”
* Roth advised him [Jonathan Brent] to strike out on his own and focus on his writing; he even managed to cajole Brent into consulting a divorce lawyer, but when it came to a point the younger man couldn’t go through with it. He loved his wife and children too much, and besides he felt “afraid of Philip emotionally”—that is, Roth’s interest in him seemed a little “voyeuristic,” and also, on some level, he sensed Roth wanted him to get a divorce so he’d become more dependent on Roth (“Philip wants me to do this for him , not for myself,” he thought). On June 29, 2000, Roth registered his irritation about Brent’s change of heart with a little note to himself: “ ‘It would be a meaningful and beautiful experience for her.’ Where did he get this language? From her? Needs the compensating sentimentality for the aggression against the wife. Now the divorce is off.”
The friendship might have survived if Roth had confined his irritation to notes, but instead he worked things out by lampooning Brent in The Dying Animal as Kepesh’s timid, self-righteous son, Kenny, who stays in a bad marriage despite his father’s well-meaning advice: “As for conjugal sex, a heinous duty he stoically performs, that is beyond even his fortitude now. Arguments abound, irritable bowel syndrome abounds, placations abound, threats abound, as do counter-threats. But when I ask, ‘Then why not leave?’ he tells me that leaving would destroy his family.” Lest there be any uncertainty on the point, Roth freely admitted to Brent that he’d used him as Kenny in the book (with the usual caveat that fiction is fiction, etc.), whereupon “at some stupid moment” Brent confided things to his wife, whose reaction may be imagined.
Afterward, relations with Roth were “very tepid at best,” though Brent couldn’t help feeling a little relieved. “He needed more emotionally from me than I could deliver,” he said, some fourteen years later. “I don’t know how else to put this: He needs somebody who can truly love him—that’s why he’s lost. Because he lives in kind of an empty world. Not intellectually empty; not artistically empty; but in some deep psychic way. And it’s an emptiness that he has cultivated very carefully. Because he can control that world. But it leaves him empty and I think he’s in great need of real love that he can’t find.”
* And when Roth marveled—deploringly—over the long duration of Alain Finkielkraut’s marriage, it occurred to Finkielkraut that he and Roth didn’t really understand each other and perhaps never would: “He doesn’t know much about my life—my private life, my books . . . I guess I am useful, but why?”
* Ross Miller—by then Roth’s health care proxy and vice versa—“never failed” him throughout these ordeals and the many to come.
“I’ve had a bumper year,” Roth wrote his friend on October 24, 2000, enclosing a check for ten thousand dollars. “I want you to share in the general prosperity.” By then the two had become all but inseparable. Jack Miles remembered sitting in Roth’s studio while Roth and Miller chatted on the phone—about nothing, really; the Mets maybe—and noting Roth’s perfect laughing ease: “They’d spoken earlier in the day and they would speak again later in the day,” said Miles. “It was like a marriage, I thought.” After years of friction with Bloom and others, it was bliss talking with a like-minded chum about “boys stuff”—baseball and books, yes, but especially women—minus the kind of inhibition that marred his camaraderie with long-married friends like Finkielkraut and Michael Herr. As Zuckerman reflects in The Human Stain , “the male friendship is incomplete” if one can’t speak openly about sex: “Most men never find such a friend. . . . But when it does happen, when two men find themselves in agreement about this essential part of being a man, unafraid of being judged, shamed, envied, or outdone, confident of not having the confidence betrayed, their human connection can be very strong and an unexpected intimacy results.” Such a friend, for a while, was Ross Miller.
Another of Miller’s assets (as Roth saw it) was that he was undaunted by Roth’s fame because he himself, after all, was the nephew of Arthur Miller—that is, he was “inured” to fame, as opposed to being (as others saw it) galled by it, and pathologically envious of those who possessed it. At the height of their friendship, anyway, Miller seemed mostly requited by his status as boon companion to one of the world’s greatest writers. “ Don’t think I’m second banana ,” he startled Hermione Lee, when she came to visit Roth in the hospital. Indeed, Miller considered himself to be Roth’s intellectual equal…
* Politics may also provide a mask for failings one can’t otherwise bear to acknowledge. As Murray explains Eve’s self-exculpatory reasoning, “I didn’t lose my husband because of the horrible trap I’m in with my daughter. I didn’t lose my husband because of all those kneeling ‘I implore you’s.’ . . . It has to be grander than that—and I must be blameless. . . . I lost my husband to Communism.”
* because of the so-called “small penis rule” (mentioned by Dinitia Smith): that is, fiction writers can protect themselves from libel suits by ascribing a small penis (or its equivalent) to a given character, since the real-life model is unlikely to announce “That character with the very small penis, that’s me!” Roth wasn’t taking chances, though: when their mutual friend Gaia Servadio assured him he’d gotten Bloom “exactly” right in the book, Roth said, “ Put it all in writing —and not your terrible handwriting; type it, and send it to me!” As for Bloom’s own thoughts on the matter, they may be gleaned in part from a 2004 article in The Independent , “Claire Bloom: The Human Pain” (a pun on Roth’s title, and perhaps a commentary on Bloom herself). “ No!” she whispered, clutching at her collar , when an interviewer described Eve Frame to her as a “self-loathing, anti-Semitic Jewess, [who] fawns over shallow society figures, [and] endures physical attacks from her overweight and vengeful daughter.” Bloom confessed she’d never read her ex-husband’s novel (“Every time I saw a copy, I felt sick or faint”), adding (“As if thinking aloud”) that she still woke up “absolutely terrified” from nightmares about him.
* Roth made only small changes to his mostly innocuous quotes—deleting, for example, the word “pussy” from this summation of the third Mrs. Bellow: “Literature student, nice Chicago family, rich pussy.”
* “I don’t think he has a real sense of what it means to be an addict,” said Roth’s worldly cleaner, Meetz. “I don’t think he understands the depth of what that does to people.” Roth was apt to concede his naiveté on that point and certain others: “I’m still from 385 Leslie Street,” he liked to say, when it came to homosexuality, violence, and alcoholism. In other words he was inclined to believe Sylvia when she told him—“with a wry acceptance of the shitty world”—about all the men who’d beaten and abandoned her, including the son of her psychotherapist, no less, whose abuse was so hideous she’d fled to the Susan B. Anthony Project for battered women in Torrington. Some of this might have been true, though her brother had reason to be skeptical. “She suffered from alcohol dependence and major depression,” he pointed out, “but she always refused therapy.” Contrary to what she’d told Roth, she hadn’t run away from home at age fourteen, given that she was at least nineteen when she accused her stepfather of trying to seduce her; it was true her mother had chosen to believe her husband’s denials, but so too did her brother (a gay activist who, alone in his family, maintained decent relations with his sister over the years): “[Sylvia] always had to be the center of attention,” he said.
* “You used to be able to sleep with the girls [students] in the old days,” he grumbled to Bellow. “And now of course it’s impossible. You go to feminist prison; you serve twenty years to life. And it makes Joliet look like nothin’ . . .” Mickey Sabbath—as an enduring protest against this state of affairs—considers leaving a bequest for a $500 annual college prize given to the female student who’s “fucked more male faculty members than any other graduating senior during her undergraduate years.”
* As for Roth, he’d maintained an air of good-humored civility throughout, but brooded and brooded afterward and seemed to grow increasingly bitter about things. Chatting with Bellow a couple weeks later, he said that young people’s “aesthetic antennae have been cut” so that they only recognize the “political uses” of literature. Indeed he blamed the man-hating faculty “harpies” who corrupted such students, especially female students, and especially with respect to the work of Philip Roth, who wasn’t about to lie down for these detractors. When he heard, in 2002, that Smith College had withdrawn permission for producers of The Human Stain to shoot on campus, allegedly because some of the dialogue was deemed offensive, Roth fired off a letter to President Carol Christ, wondering whether his novel (whence much of the dialogue was derived) had also been banned at Smith: “It’s hard for me to believe that would be so, but I would appreciate it if you’d be kind enough to let me know if it is.” And such matters continued to rankle twelve years later, when a teacher at St. Paul’s Girls’ School, in London, wrote Roth a friendly letter informing him that her students (“ eight sharp and witty feminist critics ”) were reading American Pastoral in terms of “ideology, myth, intertextuality, gender and ambivalence.” “I regret to tell you,” Roth replied, “that the words ‘ideology, myth, intertextuality, gender and ambivalence’ make my flesh crawl.”
* Roth, of course, understood that sexual freedom is, as Kepesh observes, “a very risky game. A man wouldn’t have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn’t venture off to get fucked. It’s sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.” Sex may lead to disorder in the form of, say, an unstable alcoholic paramour, or else—as Roth experienced with Margot and certain of her successors—to the ultimate disorder, love, and its concomitant loss of freedom and well-being. “I still can’t say that anything I ever did sexually excited Consuela about me,” Kepesh admits. “Which was largely why, from the evening we first went to bed eight years back, I never had a moment’s peace, why, whether she realized it or not, I was all weakness and worry from then on.”
* Perhaps one reason for the general indifference was poor timing, given that Shop Talk was published the day after 9/11—the imminence of which had been eerily suggested in The Dying Animal : “Brilliance flaring across the time zones,” Roth wrote of the millennial New Year’s Eve celebration, “and none ignited by bin Laden.”
* Roth explained that he’d never previously written about his family as they really were—“good, hard-working, responsible”—because it was “boring. . . . What I discovered inadvertently was that if you put pressure on these decent people, then you’ve got a story.” Roth was especially eager to rectify the public perception of his mother as Sophie Portnoy, and finally show her as the kind, competent person she was; however, his latest novel also required at least one defector in the family, and so Sandy became a rather unpleasant (and un-Sandy-like) Lindberghite.
* THE PEREMPTORY SIDE of Roth’s nature seemed to wax along with his eminence. “It’s impossible to know Philip and know his history without knowing all the beached fish,” said Kazin’s widow, Judith Dunford, who’d washed up on that beach herself for a time, as had Judith Thurman (“I love him anyway”), who noted that Roth was decidedly prone to letting “old griefs and resentments fester,” and hence his circle of friends tended to wane somewhat in these years…
“Things mount up in a friendship,” said Stern, explaining his complicated falling-out with Roth in 2000. First there was Roth’s thrashing of Pacific Tremors , Stern’s final novel, which Stern suspected had bothered Roth for “extra-literary” reasons—such as its emphasis on the joys of grandfatherhood, which bristled against the whole weltanschauung of Roth’s own recent novel, The Dying Animal (wherein, as Stern put it, “the only thing that counts is fucking”). Replying to Roth’s sober but caustic critique of Pacific Tremors , Stern seemed to concede a few points with his usual equanimity, while getting in a few jujitsu jabs of his own: “the prose is not in the same league with the prose I wrote for most of my writing life (which was, even so, barer, quicker, less intense and striking than yours, and errs in those directions as yours perhaps errs in the direction of excess, beating a subject to death or boredom, and sometimes miscalculating the import of certain events and revelations).” Of course, the friendship would have easily survived such an exchange, but things had indeed mounted up over the years and Stern was not quite done getting his own back. Reviewing Bellow: A Biography in the December 11 issue of The Nation , Stern wrote that he’d assured his old friend Bellow—while still in the midst of reading Atlas’s book—that he had little to worry about; then Stern read the latter part of Atlas and revised his position somewhat: “I wrote Bellow telling him that although what counted—the portrait of a remarkable person becoming over decades even more remarkable—was intact, I believe that it was deformed by Atlas’s querulous anger, if not by sanctimonious contempt, and that he and Janis would do well not to read it.” † That said, Stern’s main verdict was that Atlas had written a “fascinating and sometimes brilliant book.”
Stern’s mostly glowing notice of the Atlas book was pushing his luck, Rothwise, and yet all might have been well, still, if not for the following passage: “I’ve thought and talked about Bellow—and now this biography—with a few friends who know him,” Stern wrote.
One friend, a first-rate novelist, thinks Atlas not only misunderstands Bellow’s radical independence but resents it. So he sees a politically correct Atlas piling up criticism along familiar—to Bellow critics—misogynist, conservative and racial lines. He thinks that Atlas is shocked by Bellow’s anarchic “cocksmanship,” and when I suggested that Bellow had a grand streak of bad boy, if not outlaw, in him, he found a different way to express his own view: “He’s a transgressive monkey. And a great con man.” He makes Bellow into a version of a favorite character of his own fiction, a brilliantly anarchic, half-crazed sexual adventurer.
* While still in the outer darkness, Stern had written Jack Miles an email in which he reflected that their mutual friend had “a need to separate from those he’s ‘devoured’ ”—i.e., used for his fiction in some more or less derogatory way—and Stern was relieved, at least, that such hadn’t been his own fate (yet).
* “As for the Gentileness of you and Joel [Conarroe] as Philipian survivors, that’s intriguing,” the estranged Stern wrote Miles in 2001. “I think I prefer your ‘diplomacy,’ your loyalty, your intelligence and devotion as criteria for executorship.” Conarroe, in particular, had been a steadfast and essentially subordinate friend to Roth. During the seventies he’d acted as a good-natured procurer for Roth’s Penn classes, then gladly promoted the work of both Roth and Roth’s friends (“What’s my next assignment, boss?” he wrote Roth, after making sure a friend’s book was nominated for a major literary award in 1986) as a perennial member of prize juries. Conarroe accepted his role with stoic bemusement: “The conversation the other night,” he wrote in an August 2000 diary entry, “—and I felt subtly put down 3 or 4 times—about Lieberman, Romania, Saint Simon’s memoirs—made me feel remarkably superficial, what with my love of newspapers, magazines, tv shows, current books. One becomes an audience in Philip’s blazing presence, occasionally throwing in a word or two but mostly without much presence.”
* T HE BENEFIT OF R OTH’S PREVIOUS BACK SURGERY, IN March 2002, began to wear off a year or so later, and soon he was in terrible pain again. Making matters worse, as always, was his inability to get another novel started after he’d finished The Plot Against America in early 2004. His “physical predicament,” he said, “was not conducive to the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and emotion recollected in tranquility”—or, as he told Ross Miller during a taped interview that summer, “I’m in a fucking rut in my life. Everything.”
These days Roth often spoke in a slurred mumble because he was taking four to six Vicodin a day, along with Klonopin to steady his nerves and Ambien to help him sleep; the last had the unfortunate effect of causing random words and images to scroll along the inside of his eyelids. Looking back, Susan Rogers wondered “how much of his self-involvement, his unawareness, a lot of what he’d say or do that was mean, was part of his medical situation.” To be sure, she’d sometimes encourage Roth to take a Vicodin to lift his spirits, since the alternative was a melancholy man in agonizing pain. But there were drawbacks as well to the playful, euphoric Roth, who sustained himself with drugs during a jolly trip to the Jersey Shore with Rogers: “How did you get here?” he kept asking her over dinner one night. “I guess someone had to be here. It might as well be you.” The point of the shtick, hardly lost on Rogers, was that theirs was a more or less random connection, versus a romantic one vis-à-vis Margot and her ilk. “He thought he was being funny,” said Rogers; “it just made me feel like crap.”
Getting off such high doses of opioids was problematic, even for so iron-willed a person as Roth. Once, he tried quitting his medications cold turkey; since he couldn’t bear being alone during such an ordeal, he persuaded Rogers to stay in Connecticut and keep him company for a weekend. “Nothing was okay,” she recalled, “nothing was right: He felt abandoned, despairing.” She’d start to put her arms around the trembling man but he didn’t want to be touched, nor spoken to when she tried verbal reassurance. Rogers wanted to phone for an ambulance, but he’d insisted everything had to remain a secret. When she could leave, at last, she drove to a friend’s house and collapsed sobbing.
* The sprawling, intricately layered Plot had exhausted something in Roth; he no longer had the “mental stamina” for big novels, and, like Bellow toward the end of his career, would henceforth content himself with the taut architecture of novellas.
* AFTER HIS FINAL BREAK WITH S USAN R OGERS IN EARLY 2005—a time when he was feeling especially enfeebled and gloomy—Roth suspected he was “ too old to seriously consider attracting the women who attracted him.” One woman friend, who was “only” (as Roth would have it) about twenty years younger than he, never forgot the dispirited way he suggested she come live with him in Connecticut. “It will be nice to have some companionship,” he said. “One could go her own way when one needed to, and there might be little visits to my bed every now and then.” The woman found it a chilly proposition, and politely declined.
* Miller also tried to entice Roth’s sickly, adoring brother into confirming certain grim assumptions. “I always refer to it as the broken wing syndrome,” Sandy mildly replied, after Miller noted how a number of Philip’s girlfriends had had fathers who killed themselves. “I have a broken wing and I go for broken wings.” “But you don’t break wings,” said Miller, and Sandy, after a shocked pause, replied, “Doesn’t even enter my thinking.” Miller riffed on the theme more explicitly with Stern, citing Roth’s scheme to get Brigit pregnant so he could “capture her,” the better to have a young woman taking care of him in his dotage—a young woman, moreover, who’d previously cared for a dying mother and therefore had the “Janis [Bellow] credential.”
Stern mulled this disturbing conversation for more than two weeks before phoning Roth on December 31, 2006: Ross, he said, had interrupted him repeatedly, ranting away for some “85 percent” of the interview; ominous, too, Stern thought, was Ross’s remark that he wouldn’t publish his book until Roth was dead. “I conclude from this that Ross is in a hostilely rivalrous relationship with me,” Roth noted after hanging up, “because of his work for Volume Three of the LOA series being criticized and rejected by me.” In the months ahead, Roth continued to get reports that his biographer had gone rogue—“ This man is not your friend ,” his cousin Florence informed him—until, after the Columbia tribute, Thurman got an earful from Miller. According to an alarmed memo Roth prepared on May 29, 2008, for his executors, Golier and Wylie, Miller had boasted to Thurman that he’d actually “coauthored” Roth’s novels, beginning with The Counterlife , as opposed to reading them in rough draft and helpfully discussing them afterward. Also he’d confidently diagnosed Roth as manic-depressive; Thurman had argued with Miller that she’d certainly seen Roth depressed, but hardly manic — if the happy relief that follows recovery from a major depression is mania, well, then most of her friends were manic-depressive. Hearing of this, Roth was reminded of the Little, Brown lawyer’s mention of a “reliable source” for the reference to his alleged “bipolar disorder” in galleys for Leaving a Doll’s House.
* Indeed, what Roth had always envied most about Updike was his “ fucking fluency ”—the “gush of prose” that flowed through the man’s fingers at the rate of three pages a day, every day, for more than half a century, resulting in forty-five books of stories, poetry, and essays, and twenty-eight novels: seventy-three books! ¶ Roth’s own thirty-one came at a relative trickle of a page a day, usually, and he was “ delighted to accept ” that much.
* When Roth kept waking up and realizing he was still alive—his wish to withdraw cardiac care had yet to be formalized, and he continued to receive medicine for arrhythmia—he became a little vexed. Golier, his health care agent, explained that certain “procedural issues” had to be observed. “ Do you mean to tell me, Julia ,” he said in a slow, indignant voice, “that I have come to the end of my life only to find out that absolutely nothing is under my control?” One such procedure entailed consulting with his psychiatrist, Richard Friedman, whom Roth assured that he wasn’t clinically depressed or even sad, but quite lucidly capable of a decision to end his life. Finally—on Tuesday afternoon, May 22—he was ready to receive terminal sedation, and said goodbye to Ben and Julia: “I loved your kiddos,” he said to the latter. “They were the joy of my life.” Then he thanked the nurses.
