{"id":138334,"date":"2021-04-09T10:19:58","date_gmt":"2021-04-09T18:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138334"},"modified":"2021-04-13T15:55:11","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T23:55:11","slug":"philip-roth-the-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138334","title":{"rendered":"Philip Roth: The Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this new book by Blake Bailey<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* Wolfe was the catalyst for Roth\u2019s ambition to become an artist of titanic appetites\u2014geographic, intellectual, sexual.<\/p>\n

* He also lifted weights, he said, so he could become strong enough to get a girl \u201cto put her hand on [his] cock.\u201d As he evoked the era sixty-two years later, \u201cThe erections of 1950 were exactly the same as the erections of 2012, but the erections of 1950 had nowhere to go.\u201d Reflecting on the bygone phenomenon of blue balls (\u201cno kid knows what they are anymore\u201d), he described nights on a porch glider with the petite Elaine Goldberg, toward whom he exerted a \u201cmonumental\u201d tenacity, to little avail. \u201cBent over like a cripple\u201d afterward, he\u2019d limp as far as a clump of bushes near the high school, \u201csavagely beating off\u201d to ease the pain, then proceed to Syd\u2019s and sit down with Stu Lehman or one of the others. ( \u201cYou got the blue balls?\u201d \u201cYeah.\u201d ) 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 ( \u201c This is it! \u201d 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 (\u201c I spent many Sunday afternoons there ,\u201d 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. *
\n Perhaps the closest Roth and his friends came to sex were necking parties in Heyman\u2019s finished basement\u2014\u201cthe most beautiful word in the English language,\u201d as Roth liked to say (he also insisted it was one word: \u201cfinishedbasement\u201d). Daytime they\u2019d while away the hours playing Ping-Pong and telling jokes; at night they\u2019d bring dates and dance to Billy Eckstine records (\u201cwhile pressing your groin as hard as possible into the groin of your sweet young partner\u201d). Roth\u2019s main date that first year out of high school was Joan Bressler, who\u2019d been two years above him at Weequahic and now attended teachers\u2019 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: \u201cCapote 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

* 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.<\/p>\n

* While Roth (still pre-law) spent almost every night in the library until it closed, the goyim of Bucknell were \u201cgetting drunk, getting pinned, [and] not studying\u201d; 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\u2019s leading young Jewish intellectuals, Roth would opine for a Commentary symposium that Jews of his generation were united not by \u201c a complex of values or aspirations or beliefs\u201d but rather by a \u201cpowerful disbelief\u201d\u2014to wit, \u201cthe rejection of the myth of Jesus as Christ.\u201d Thus, an especially hateful requirement, at Bucknell, had been weekly chapel attendance during which Roth would sit dourly reading Schopenhauer. \u201c I felt like a Houyhnhnm who had strayed on to campus from Gulliver\u2019s Travels .\u201d<\/p>\n

* At first his passion for learning was more promiscuous than ever. He\u2019d found his constitutional law class so engrossing that he\u2019d accepted an invitation to spend a semester at American University in Washington, Washington, D.C.\u2014but then became enthralled with his world literature class and decided to double-major in English and political science, and finally dropped pre-law altogether.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019s car: \u201cto my astonishment and hers,\u201d Roth remembered, \u201cshe performed fellatio.\u201d 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)\u2014indeed, all he knew about such an act, he said, was that \u201cwhores did it\u201d; in the moment he remembered thinking the girl\u2019s parents must be divorced. Sides remembered things differently. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t the least bit romantic,\u201d she said, claiming Roth had put a hand on the back of her head: \u201cI think it was more of an encouragement, not coercive, but I didn\u2019t know how to politely withdraw.\u201d It may have been so, given that Roth would concede more than once, in all apparent innocence, that one had to \u201chave an aggressive side\u201d in those days to get anything in the way of sex: \u201cI don\u2019t mean nasty aggressive; I mean a forceful nature.\u201d
\n Roth was seventy-six when he got back in touch with Sides, post- Indignation , inquiring with sincere curiosity what she\u2019d made of the incident at the cemetery (a linchpin scene in the book). \u201cI was surprised,\u201d she wrote back, \u201c\u2014no, I was appalled. . . . I didn\u2019t have any resources for dealing with it so I just cut you out of my life.\u201d 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 \u201csomething a little broken\u201d 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). \u201cWell, you don\u2019t need to be dating a Jewish boy,\u201d he said, betraying an anti-Semitism whereof she\u2019d had no previous inkling.
\n \u201cI feel very tenderly toward her,\u201d Roth said, a few years before he was moved to contact Ann Sides Bishop. \u201cIf there were any reason to go to the reunion, it would be to see this seventy-two-year-old woman.\u201d As it happened, Bishop had been \u201cdining out on Philip Roth for years,\u201d as she put it: her granddaughter had been a Ph.D. candidate at Penn a few years after Roth\u2019s time as a celebrated faculty member, and the young woman was \u201clionized\u201d when her colleagues learned that her grandmother had dated Roth.<\/p>\n

* Roth\u2019s 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\u2019s, Roth \u201cpicked up [his] one and only black girl\u201d (ever)\u2014a light-skinned Roosevelt College student whose name enchanted him: Arizona McGill. Women were no more welcome at the Divinity House than at Mrs. Purnell\u2019s, and Roth had to smuggle her into the basement. The two dated for a short while, and Roth never forgot his meeting with Arizona\u2019s even lighter-skinned mother, who told him that certain relatives of hers were \u201c lost to all their people \u201d\u2014that is, had decided to pass as white, \u201cnever to return,\u201d a detail that would occur to Roth forty-four years later, while writing The Human Stain.<\/p>\n

* While Roth moonlighted as a playwright, his friend Bob Silvers made him the New York Review of Books \u2019 \u201c hatchet man in the theater ,\u201d as Roth put it\u2014at 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\u2019s pleasant acquaintance with James Baldwin may have suffered as a result of his assessment of Blues for Mister Charlie :
\n 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\u2019s word power.<\/p>\n

* \u201cI hope to do for the fags this time what I did for the colored last,\u201d Roth quipped about his second review, in February 1965, of Albee\u2019s 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\u2019t abide the \u201cgalling sophistication\u201d and \u201cghastly pansy rhetoric\u201d of what was evidently meant to be an all but impenetrable allegory of gay life.<\/p>\n

* In his book about the Portnoy phenomenon, Promiscuous , Roth\u2019s friend Bernard Avishai provided this intriguing bit of trivia: \u201cItem: 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\u2014wait for it!\u2014Gershom Scholem.\u201d<\/p>\n

* 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 \u201c a bit more company than the typewriter \u201d\u2014which 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. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a word processor!\u201d Updike congratulated him. \u201cWelcome to this wonderful world. You\u2019ll be able to double your output, delighting your friends and confounding your foes.\u201d<\/p>\n

* One sign that he\u2019d exhausted the pleasure of Sabbath\u2019s company was his visceral reaction to the sight of Sabbath\u2019s Theater on the bedside table of Julia Golier\u2019s sweet Catholic mother: \u201cI felt so ashamed ,\u201d said Roth.<\/p>\n

* A measure of Roth\u2019s self-involvement, and\/or a kind of selective naivet\u00e9, was his inability to grasp at the time that Bloom meant to do him harm.<\/p>\n

* \u201cYou have already had Portnoy\u2019s complaint,\u201d Gore Vidal advised her [Claire Bloom] back in 1975, referring to her recent divorce from a man who\u2019d exploited her sexually and otherwise, Hilly Elkins. \u201cDo not involve herself with Portnoy.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Daphne Merkin, however, writing in The New Yorker , wondered at Bloom\u2019s lack of \u201cany 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.\u201d \u00a7 As for Bloom\u2019s alleged fairness despite her victimhood, Merkin noted that Roth and others had proved quite useful to her career: \u201cOne can discern, through the pious gloss Bloom puts on the events of her life, the shrewd maneuverings of a stage brat\u201d\u2014a sentiment Zo\u00eb Heller echoed more bluntly in the London Review of Books : \u201cbeneath the guise of a bashed butterfly, a scorpion.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Just as Roth, regarding his two marriages, sometimes liked to think he\u2019d more or less accidentally stumbled into disastrous attachments with unstable women (\u201ca man\u2019s fate is the joke that his life plays on his character\u201d), so Roth couldn\u2019t abide the idea that Levov and his other tragic heroes are being \u201cpunished\u201d for their human flaws; rather they\u2019re random victims of history, and hence Roth\u2019s notion to title his American Trilogy \u201cBlindsided.\u201d<\/p>\n

* One of the very few critics Roth respected, Louis Menand, suggested in The New Yorker that what Swede is \u201cblindsided by is the culture of liberal permissiveness,\u201d and for this reason Menand predicted some readers would construe the novel as \u201ca kind of recantation\u201d by the author of Portnoy\u2019s Complaint, \u201ca swerve to the cultural right.\u201d Lo and behold, Roth\u2019s old nemesis Norman Podhoretz applauded \u201c a born-again Philip Roth . . . . Here, for once, it was the ordinary Jews of his childhood who were celebrated\u2014for their decency, their sense of responsibility, their seriousness about their work, their patriotism\u2014and here, for once, those who rejected and despised such virtues were shown to be either pathologically nihilistic or smug, self-righteous, and unimaginative.\u201d But Roth himself wasn\u2019t having any of it\u2014or 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\u2019s hardly the embodiment of a \u201cpermissive\u201d 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 \u201cunder house arrest,\u201d while helpfully suggesting she \u201c[b]ring the war home\u201d by organizing the movement in Old Rimrock. Whereupon she blows up the general store.<\/p>\n

* \u201cYou\u2019re 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,\u201d Rita Cohen taunts Levov, who produces (yet again) an insight of Rothian percipience: \u201cThe 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

* \u201cAlfred [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\u2019s prose style.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2011, Kazin\u2019s journals were published by Yale University Press, and Roth learned how deeply one of his idols had loathed him. \u201cPhilip Roth, the male shrew\u201d was a favorite epithet, referring (a little ironically, Roth thought) to the younger man\u2019s tendency to monopolize conversations in a noisy, pompous way, so that Kazin was \u201calways glad to see him depart in all his prosperity and self-satisfaction.”<\/p>\n

* \u201cBeware the utopia of isolation,\u201d Murray Ringold warns Zuckerman toward the end of I Married a Communist . \u201cBeware the utopia of the shack in the woods, the oasis defense against rage and grief. An impregnable solitude.\u201d<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019t go through with it. He loved his wife and children too much, and besides he felt \u201cafraid of Philip emotionally\u201d\u2014that is, Roth\u2019s interest in him seemed a little \u201cvoyeuristic,\u201d and also, on some level, he sensed Roth wanted him to get a divorce so he\u2019d become more dependent on Roth (\u201cPhilip wants me to do this for him , not for myself,\u201d he thought). On June 29, 2000, Roth registered his irritation about Brent\u2019s change of heart with a little note to himself: \u201c \u2018It would be a meaningful and beautiful experience for her.\u2019 Where did he get this language? From her? Needs the compensating sentimentality for the aggression against the wife. Now the divorce is off.\u201d
\n 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\u2019s timid, self-righteous son, Kenny, who stays in a bad marriage despite his father\u2019s well-meaning advice: \u201cAs 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, \u2018Then why not leave?\u2019 he tells me that leaving would destroy his family.\u201d Lest there be any uncertainty on the point, Roth freely admitted to Brent that he\u2019d used him as Kenny in the book (with the usual caveat that fiction is fiction, etc.), whereupon \u201cat some stupid moment\u201d Brent confided things to his wife, whose reaction may be imagined.
\n Afterward, relations with Roth were \u201cvery tepid at best,\u201d though Brent couldn\u2019t help feeling a little relieved. \u201cHe needed more emotionally from me than I could deliver,\u201d he said, some fourteen years later. \u201cI don\u2019t know how else to put this: He needs somebody who can truly love him\u2014that\u2019s why he\u2019s lost. Because he lives in kind of an empty world. Not intellectually empty; not artistically empty; but in some deep psychic way. And it\u2019s an emptiness that he has cultivated very carefully. Because he can control that world. But it leaves him empty and I think he\u2019s in great need of real love that he can\u2019t find.\u201d<\/p>\n

* And when Roth marveled\u2014deploringly\u2014over the long duration of Alain Finkielkraut\u2019s marriage, it occurred to Finkielkraut that he and Roth didn\u2019t really understand each other and perhaps never would: \u201cHe doesn\u2019t know much about my life\u2014my private life, my books . . . I guess I am useful, but why?\u201d <\/p>\n

* Ross Miller\u2014by then Roth\u2019s health care proxy and vice versa\u2014\u201cnever failed\u201d him throughout these ordeals and the many to come.
\n \u201cI\u2019ve had a bumper year,\u201d Roth wrote his friend on October 24, 2000, enclosing a check for ten thousand dollars. \u201cI want you to share in the general prosperity.\u201d By then the two had become all but inseparable. Jack Miles remembered sitting in Roth\u2019s studio while Roth and Miller chatted on the phone\u2014about nothing, really; the Mets maybe\u2014and noting Roth\u2019s perfect laughing ease: \u201cThey\u2019d spoken earlier in the day and they would speak again later in the day,\u201d said Miles. \u201cIt was like a marriage, I thought.\u201d After years of friction with Bloom and others, it was bliss talking with a like-minded chum about \u201cboys stuff\u201d\u2014baseball and books, yes, but especially women\u2014minus the kind of inhibition that marred his camaraderie with long-married friends like Finkielkraut and Michael Herr. As Zuckerman reflects in The Human Stain , \u201cthe male friendship is incomplete\u201d if one can\u2019t speak openly about sex: \u201cMost 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.\u201d Such a friend, for a while, was Ross Miller.
\n Another of Miller\u2019s assets (as Roth saw it) was that he was undaunted by Roth\u2019s fame because he himself, after all, was the nephew of Arthur Miller\u2014that is, he was \u201cinured\u201d 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\u2019s greatest writers. \u201c Don\u2019t think I\u2019m second banana ,\u201d he startled Hermione Lee, when she came to visit Roth in the hospital. Indeed, Miller considered himself to be Roth\u2019s intellectual equal…<\/p>\n

* Politics may also provide a mask for failings one can\u2019t otherwise bear to acknowledge. As Murray explains Eve\u2019s self-exculpatory reasoning, \u201cI didn\u2019t lose my husband because of the horrible trap I\u2019m in with my daughter. I didn\u2019t lose my husband because of all those kneeling \u2018I implore you\u2019s.\u2019 . . . It has to be grander than that\u2014and I must be blameless. . . . I lost my husband to Communism.\u201d<\/p>\n

* because of the so-called \u201csmall penis rule\u201d (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 \u201cThat character with the very small penis, that\u2019s me!\u201d Roth wasn\u2019t taking chances, though: when their mutual friend Gaia Servadio assured him he\u2019d gotten Bloom \u201cexactly\u201d right in the book, Roth said, \u201c Put it all in writing \u2014and not your terrible handwriting; type it, and send it to me!\u201d As for Bloom\u2019s own thoughts on the matter, they may be gleaned in part from a 2004 article in The Independent , \u201cClaire Bloom: The Human Pain\u201d (a pun on Roth\u2019s title, and perhaps a commentary on Bloom herself). \u201c No!\u201d she whispered, clutching at her collar , when an interviewer described Eve Frame to her as a \u201cself-loathing, anti-Semitic Jewess, [who] fawns over shallow society figures, [and] endures physical attacks from her overweight and vengeful daughter.\u201d Bloom confessed she\u2019d never read her ex-husband\u2019s novel (\u201cEvery time I saw a copy, I felt sick or faint\u201d), adding (\u201cAs if thinking aloud\u201d) that she still woke up \u201cabsolutely terrified\u201d from nightmares about him.<\/p>\n

* Roth made only small changes to his mostly innocuous quotes\u2014deleting, for example, the word \u201cpussy\u201d from this summation of the third Mrs. Bellow: \u201cLiterature student, nice Chicago family, rich pussy.\u201d<\/p>\n

* \u201cI don\u2019t think he has a real sense of what it means to be an addict,\u201d said Roth\u2019s worldly cleaner, Meetz. \u201cI don\u2019t think he understands the depth of what that does to people.\u201d Roth was apt to concede his naivet\u00e9 on that point and certain others: \u201cI\u2019m still from 385 Leslie Street,\u201d 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\u2014\u201cwith a wry acceptance of the shitty world\u201d\u2014about all the men who\u2019d beaten and abandoned her, including the son of her psychotherapist, no less, whose abuse was so hideous she\u2019d 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. \u201cShe suffered from alcohol dependence and major depression,\u201d he pointed out, \u201cbut she always refused therapy.\u201d Contrary to what she\u2019d told Roth, she hadn\u2019t 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\u2019s denials, but so too did her brother (a gay activist who, alone in his family, maintained decent relations with his sister over the years): \u201c[Sylvia] always had to be the center of attention,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

* \u201cYou used to be able to sleep with the girls [students] in the old days,\u201d he grumbled to Bellow. \u201cAnd now of course it\u2019s impossible. You go to feminist prison; you serve twenty years to life. And it makes Joliet look like nothin\u2019 . . .\u201d Mickey Sabbath\u2014as an enduring protest against this state of affairs\u2014considers leaving a bequest for a $500 annual college prize given to the female student who\u2019s \u201cfucked more male faculty members than any other graduating senior during her undergraduate years.\u201d<\/p>\n

* As for Roth, he\u2019d 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\u2019s \u201caesthetic antennae have been cut\u201d so that they only recognize the \u201cpolitical uses\u201d of literature. Indeed he blamed the man-hating faculty \u201charpies\u201d who corrupted such students, especially female students, and especially with respect to the work of Philip Roth, who wasn\u2019t 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: \u201cIt\u2019s hard for me to believe that would be so, but I would appreciate it if you\u2019d be kind enough to let me know if it is.\u201d And such matters continued to rankle twelve years later, when a teacher at St. Paul\u2019s Girls\u2019 School, in London, wrote Roth a friendly letter informing him that her students (\u201c eight sharp and witty feminist critics \u201d) were reading American Pastoral in terms of \u201cideology, myth, intertextuality, gender and ambivalence.\u201d \u201cI regret to tell you,\u201d Roth replied, \u201cthat the words \u2018ideology, myth, intertextuality, gender and ambivalence\u2019 make my flesh crawl.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Roth, of course, understood that sexual freedom is, as Kepesh observes, \u201ca very risky game. A man wouldn\u2019t have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn\u2019t venture off to get fucked. It\u2019s sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.\u201d Sex may lead to disorder in the form of, say, an unstable alcoholic paramour, or else\u2014as Roth experienced with Margot and certain of her successors\u2014to the ultimate disorder, love, and its concomitant loss of freedom and well-being. \u201cI still can\u2019t say that anything I ever did sexually excited Consuela about me,\u201d Kepesh admits. \u201cWhich was largely why, from the evening we first went to bed eight years back, I never had a moment\u2019s peace, why, whether she realized it or not, I was all weakness and worry from then on.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Perhaps one reason for the general indifference was poor timing, given that Shop Talk was published the day after 9\/11\u2014the imminence of which had been eerily suggested in The Dying Animal : \u201cBrilliance flaring across the time zones,\u201d Roth wrote of the millennial New Year\u2019s Eve celebration, \u201cand none ignited by bin Laden.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Roth explained that he\u2019d never previously written about his family as they really were\u2014\u201cgood, hard-working, responsible\u201d\u2014because it was \u201cboring. . . . What I discovered inadvertently was that if you put pressure on these decent people, then you\u2019ve got a story.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

* THE PEREMPTORY SIDE of Roth\u2019s nature seemed to wax along with his eminence. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to know Philip and know his history without knowing all the beached fish,\u201d said Kazin\u2019s widow, Judith Dunford, who\u2019d washed up on that beach herself for a time, as had Judith Thurman (\u201cI love him anyway\u201d), who noted that Roth was decidedly prone to letting \u201cold griefs and resentments fester,\u201d and hence his circle of friends tended to wane somewhat in these years…<\/p>\n

\u201cThings mount up in a friendship,\u201d said Stern, explaining his complicated falling-out with Roth in 2000. First there was Roth\u2019s thrashing of Pacific Tremors , Stern\u2019s final novel, which Stern suspected had bothered Roth for \u201cextra-literary\u201d reasons\u2014such as its emphasis on the joys of grandfatherhood, which bristled against the whole weltanschauung of Roth\u2019s own recent novel, The Dying Animal (wherein, as Stern put it, \u201cthe only thing that counts is fucking\u201d). Replying to Roth\u2019s 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: \u201cthe 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).\u201d 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\u2019d assured his old friend Bellow\u2014while still in the midst of reading Atlas\u2019s book\u2014that he had little to worry about; then Stern read the latter part of Atlas and revised his position somewhat: \u201cI wrote Bellow telling him that although what counted\u2014the portrait of a remarkable person becoming over decades even more remarkable\u2014was intact, I believe that it was deformed by Atlas\u2019s querulous anger, if not by sanctimonious contempt, and that he and Janis would do well not to read it.\u201d \u2020 That said, Stern\u2019s main verdict was that Atlas had written a \u201cfascinating and sometimes brilliant book.\u201d
\n Stern\u2019s 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: \u201cI\u2019ve thought and talked about Bellow\u2014and now this biography\u2014with a few friends who know him,\u201d Stern wrote.
\n One friend, a first-rate novelist, thinks Atlas not only misunderstands Bellow\u2019s radical independence but resents it. So he sees a politically correct Atlas piling up criticism along familiar\u2014to Bellow critics\u2014misogynist, conservative and racial lines. He thinks that Atlas is shocked by Bellow\u2019s anarchic \u201ccocksmanship,\u201d 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: \u201cHe\u2019s a transgressive monkey. And a great con man.\u201d He makes Bellow into a version of a favorite character of his own fiction, a brilliantly anarchic, half-crazed sexual adventurer.<\/p>\n

* While still in the outer darkness, Stern had written Jack Miles an email in which he reflected that their mutual friend had \u201ca need to separate from those he\u2019s \u2018devoured\u2019 \u201d\u2014i.e., used for his fiction in some more or less derogatory way\u2014and Stern was relieved, at least, that such hadn\u2019t been his own fate (yet).<\/p>\n

* \u201cAs for the Gentileness of you and Joel [Conarroe] as Philipian survivors, that\u2019s intriguing,\u201d the estranged Stern wrote Miles in 2001. \u201cI think I prefer your \u2018diplomacy,\u2019 your loyalty, your intelligence and devotion as criteria for executorship.\u201d Conarroe, in particular, had been a steadfast and essentially subordinate friend to Roth. During the seventies he\u2019d acted as a good-natured procurer for Roth\u2019s Penn classes, then gladly promoted the work of both Roth and Roth\u2019s friends (\u201cWhat\u2019s my next assignment, boss?\u201d he wrote Roth, after making sure a friend\u2019s book was nominated for a major literary award in 1986) as a perennial member of prize juries. Conarroe accepted his role with stoic bemusement: \u201cThe conversation the other night,\u201d he wrote in an August 2000 diary entry, \u201c\u2014and I felt subtly put down 3 or 4 times\u2014about Lieberman, Romania, Saint Simon\u2019s memoirs\u2014made me feel remarkably superficial, what with my love of newspapers, magazines, tv shows, current books. One becomes an audience in Philip\u2019s blazing presence, occasionally throwing in a word or two but mostly without much presence.\u201d<\/p>\n

* T HE BENEFIT OF R OTH\u2019S 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\u2019d finished The Plot Against America in early 2004. His \u201cphysical predicament,\u201d he said, \u201cwas not conducive to the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and emotion recollected in tranquility\u201d\u2014or, as he told Ross Miller during a taped interview that summer, \u201cI\u2019m in a fucking rut in my life. Everything.\u201d
\n 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 \u201chow much of his self-involvement, his unawareness, a lot of what he\u2019d say or do that was mean, was part of his medical situation.\u201d To be sure, she\u2019d 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: \u201cHow did you get here?\u201d he kept asking her over dinner one night. \u201cI guess someone had to be here. It might as well be you.\u201d The point of the shtick, hardly lost on Rogers, was that theirs was a more or less random connection, versus a romantic one vis-\u00e0-vis Margot and her ilk. \u201cHe thought he was being funny,\u201d said Rogers; \u201cit just made me feel like crap.\u201d
\n 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\u2019t bear being alone during such an ordeal, he persuaded Rogers to stay in Connecticut and keep him company for a weekend. \u201cNothing was okay,\u201d she recalled, \u201cnothing was right: He felt abandoned, despairing.\u201d She\u2019d start to put her arms around the trembling man but he didn\u2019t want to be touched, nor spoken to when she tried verbal reassurance. Rogers wanted to phone for an ambulance, but he\u2019d insisted everything had to remain a secret. When she could leave, at last, she drove to a friend\u2019s house and collapsed sobbing.<\/p>\n

* The sprawling, intricately layered Plot had exhausted something in Roth; he no longer had the \u201cmental stamina\u201d for big novels, and, like Bellow toward the end of his career, would henceforth content himself with the taut architecture of novellas.<\/p>\n

* AFTER HIS FINAL BREAK WITH S USAN R OGERS IN EARLY 2005\u2014a time when he was feeling especially enfeebled and gloomy\u2014Roth suspected he was \u201c too old to seriously consider attracting the women who attracted him.\u201d One woman friend, who was \u201conly\u201d (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. \u201cIt will be nice to have some companionship,\u201d he said. \u201cOne could go her own way when one needed to, and there might be little visits to my bed every now and then.\u201d The woman found it a chilly proposition, and politely declined.<\/p>\n

* Miller also tried to entice Roth\u2019s sickly, adoring brother into confirming certain grim assumptions. \u201cI always refer to it as the broken wing syndrome,\u201d Sandy mildly replied, after Miller noted how a number of Philip\u2019s girlfriends had had fathers who killed themselves. \u201cI have a broken wing and I go for broken wings.\u201d \u201cBut you don\u2019t break wings,\u201d said Miller, and Sandy, after a shocked pause, replied, \u201cDoesn\u2019t even enter my thinking.\u201d Miller riffed on the theme more explicitly with Stern, citing Roth\u2019s scheme to get Brigit pregnant so he could \u201ccapture her,\u201d the better to have a young woman taking care of him in his dotage\u2014a young woman, moreover, who\u2019d previously cared for a dying mother and therefore had the \u201cJanis [Bellow] credential.\u201d
\n 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 \u201c85 percent\u201d of the interview; ominous, too, Stern thought, was Ross\u2019s remark that he wouldn\u2019t publish his book until Roth was dead. \u201cI conclude from this that Ross is in a hostilely rivalrous relationship with me,\u201d Roth noted after hanging up, \u201cbecause of his work for Volume Three of the LOA series being criticized and rejected by me.\u201d In the months ahead, Roth continued to get reports that his biographer had gone rogue\u2014\u201c This man is not your friend ,\u201d his cousin Florence informed him\u2014until, 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\u2019d actually \u201ccoauthored\u201d Roth\u2019s novels, beginning with The Counterlife , as opposed to reading them in rough draft and helpfully discussing them afterward. Also he\u2019d confidently diagnosed Roth as manic-depressive; Thurman had argued with Miller that she\u2019d certainly seen Roth depressed, but hardly manic \u2014 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\u2019s mention of a \u201creliable source\u201d for the reference to his alleged \u201cbipolar disorder\u201d in galleys for Leaving a Doll\u2019s House.<\/p>\n

* Indeed, what Roth had always envied most about Updike was his \u201c fucking fluency \u201d\u2014the \u201cgush of prose\u201d that flowed through the man\u2019s 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! \u00b6 Roth\u2019s own thirty-one came at a relative trickle of a page a day, usually, and he was \u201c delighted to accept \u201d that much.<\/p>\n

* When Roth kept waking up and realizing he was still alive\u2014his wish to withdraw cardiac care had yet to be formalized, and he continued to receive medicine for arrhythmia\u2014he became a little vexed. Golier, his health care agent, explained that certain \u201cprocedural issues\u201d had to be observed. \u201c Do you mean to tell me, Julia ,\u201d he said in a slow, indignant voice, \u201cthat I have come to the end of my life only to find out that absolutely nothing is under my control?\u201d One such procedure entailed consulting with his psychiatrist, Richard Friedman, whom Roth assured that he wasn\u2019t clinically depressed or even sad, but quite lucidly capable of a decision to end his life. Finally\u2014on Tuesday afternoon, May 22\u2014he was ready to receive terminal sedation, and said goodbye to Ben and Julia: \u201cI loved your kiddos,\u201d he said to the latter. \u201cThey were the joy of my life.\u201d Then he thanked the nurses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this new book by Blake Bailey: * Wolfe was the catalyst for Roth\u2019s ambition to become an artist of titanic appetites\u2014geographic, intellectual, sexual. * He also lifted weights, he said, so he could become strong … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11055],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philip-roth"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t