CHAPTER
Eleven
ROTH DEPARTED ON JUNE 6, 1958, ABOARD THE STAATENDAM, occupying himself either with Ping-Pong or reading in a deck chair. From Southampton he took a train to London and found a bed-and-breakfast around the corner from the British Museum. That first day (on Miss Martin’s recommendation) he saw the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles, then after dinner he “stumbled on Soho” and found the sidewalks crowded with prostitutes. “I made a circuit of Soho Square and then chose one,” he remembered, “who led me up a steep flight of stairs to a small room where our business was quickly transacted.” The rest of that rainy week he dutifully visited every site he knew in London of literary significance, from Donne’s church to Carlyle’s house and various other places relevant to writers he’d encountered in Baugh’s Literary History of England.
In Paris he stayed at a little Left Bank hotel that Jacquie Rogers had recommended and lost no time looking up the local editor of The Paris Review, Nelson Aldrich—“a handsome young man of qualities,” as Roth put it, whose background could scarcely have been more different than his own. The great-grandson and namesake of a Republican senator, Aldrich was a product of St. Paul’s and Harvard; he’d read a couple of Roth’s stories and knew the author was roughly his own age, but whatever he expected fell short of the actuality: “I don’t think I’ve ever so quickly been attracted to a man,” said Aldrich. “I felt that we were boys together talking about girls. We didn’t talk about books or writers—we talked about Paris and its delights.” The young men drifted from one café to the next, and after Roth had met Aldrich’s girlfriend, Jill, she remarked to Aldrich, “Very funny man but I felt he was always looking up my skirt.”
On a Tuesday night in early July, Roth was presented with the Aga Khan Prize at the splendid Bois de Boulogne residence of Prince Aly Khan, the son of Aga Khan III (“the staggeringly rich leader of the Ismaili Muslims”) and third husband of Rita Hayworth. As Roth reported, a little high-mindedly, to Miss Martin: “There were all kinds of elegant people with titles there, and a Match photographer took my picture, and all of it had absolutely so little to do with writing, and even with me, that it was in the end rather more pathetic than comic.” Roth refrained from mentioning the ruckus caused at one point when the butler detained his date, a young woman on a motorbike whom he’d picked up at the Café Odeon; she loudly insisted she was invited until Roth went downstairs to sort things out. After the party, a group repaired to the Left Bank for dinner, and Roth found himself sitting next to the writer Irwin Shaw, who every so often would remind him, over the years, that he still had an open invitation to visit the Shaws in Paris or Switzerland.
Since getting out of the army two years before, Roth’s life had been a heavy (if mostly fruitful) grind of writing and teaching and coping with Maggie; that summer he allowed himself “to do absolutely nothing,” or anyway he didn’t bother to write. With a friend from Chicago, he met two Swedish girls and paired off with one of them, Monica—“a wonderful interlude” that lasted two or three weeks before Roth decided to head south to Italy at the end of July. (Monica invited him to visit her in Sweden, and soon enough Roth would sorely regret not having taken her up on it.) At the American Express Roth hitched a ride with two countrymen, stopping along the way at Carcassonne, Arles, Avignon, and Nice; he was felled by a sudden attack of back pain in Livorno, and had to lie down in a hotel for a few days. Finally he strapped himself into his steel brace and caught a train to Florence.
“I’m fond of looking at Paris, but it was Florence that really charmed me thoroughly,” he wrote Miss Martin. “I was there five days and left foolishly for Venice, where I lasted about 36 hours. I had the feeling that if I wrote out a big enough check there, someone would sell me San Marco.” In Florence Roth had been struck by the piquant incongruity of vulgar Americans and gorgeous, abiding art (“Every surface in the city, the bastards painted”), but he soon returned to Paris to spend a few weeks “calmly alone,” reflecting on his latest good fortune.
Back in February he’d heard from his old Chicago friend George Starbuck, who’d also quit graduate school and taken a job as editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston; Starbuck had been following Roth’s career with interest and wondered whether he was working on a novel. Roth replied that he was indeed working on something set in Frankfurt, The Go-Between, but was particularly excited about a long story he was just then completing, Goodbye, Columbus; he wondered whether it was hefty enough to submit (perhaps as part of a larger collection?) for their Houghton Mifflin Fellowship ($2,500), the oldest publisher-sponsored award of its kind: “I shall be twenty-five next week and stouter,” Roth wrote, “and feel a tiny knife in my side as I race to be a boy wonder.” Such was his hurry that he held fast when Starbuck pressed him only for the unfinished novel; Roth understood “the prejudice against books of stories from novelless writers,” but felt certain that Goodbye, Columbus “could have a very wide appeal, perhaps to that same group who buy Salinger by the thousands.” Finally, when Roth threatened to take his work elsewhere, Starbuck agreed to consider both the novella and a fragment of The Go-Between. The New Yorker and Esquire, meanwhile, had both passed on the long and problematic Goodbye, Columbus, but Roth’s friends at The Paris Review were willing to publish every word of it (“It looks as though it’s going to take up the whole magazine,” he wrote the Maurers, “tra la”), as early as their Autumn–Winter 1958 issue—meaning that three consecutive issues would feature work by the young and still rather unknown Philip Roth.
That left the editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin, Paul Brooks, with a “knotty publishing problem” as he wrote in an internal memo. Given that Goodbye, Columbus was to be published in full by The Paris Review, it made sense for Houghton to combine it with other stories (“on the pattern of Carson McCullers’ BALLAD OF SAD CAFE”): “One difficulty, perhaps, is that the denouement hinges on an incident involving a contraceptive apparatus—and it is hard to see how this could be changed without rewriting the whole story.” As for Roth’s other manuscript—“57 pages and a synopsis of a novel set in Frankfurt”—it had been received with “the greatest enthusiasm” by Starbuck, but Brooks and two of their colleagues (both of whom knew Frankfurt) were not “nearly so enthusiastic,” Brooks noted. “It seems to me that the difference between this and his American writing is the difference between a story that starts with an intellectual idea and a story that embodies the life that the author has lived.” Such was the astute reasoning that led, five days later, to their offering Roth a $1,000 advance to publish Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories, whereas the novel would remain “under consideration for a Fellowship” pending submission of a more complete manuscript. Roth got the news on August 4 in Paris and was “thrilled”—but then his agent, Donadio, negotiated a counteroffer of $2,500 from Viking, which Houghton promptly agreed to match and publish the collection as a prestigious Houghton Mifflin Fellowship Book. Whereupon Roth wired Napier Wilt, requesting a yearlong leave of absence.
ROTH BOARDED THE Hanseatic on August 21, 1958, in Hamburg, and spent much of the crossing in the company of a young English architect, Vernon Gibberd. One evening they stood on deck watching the sun go down, and the moment it slipped behind the horizon, Roth broke into raucous applause that caused a few of his fellow passengers to chuckle nervously and others to edge away with offended looks. The cumulative effect of such antics was charming: “In the right mood,” said Gibberd, “he was the greatest company in the world.” Roth divided the two-volume Olympia Press edition of Lolita between them, to be smuggled into the States as contraband, only to find the Putnam edition had been published in America that very month. Also Roth managed to have an affair on the boat and worried, in passing, that the woman might get pregnant. “He was pretty laissez-faire about these things,” Gibberd observed.
Roth and Maggie had corresponded steadily over the summer, and (outward behavior to the contrary) Roth’s heart had grown a bit fonder in her absence. “She is a rare person,” he wrote Solotaroff, “and if I were a little rarer I’d have not screwed things up so often.” He made it clear he wanted her to stay in New York rather than return to Chicago after her Esquire job ended, and when his ship came in she was standing on the pier, waving radiantly in a white dress that made her look like a summer bride (“Maybe that was the idea”).
Gene Lichtenstein had also gone to Europe for the summer, while his wife, Cynthia, a second-year law student at Yale, stayed behind to clerk for a firm in New York; as it happened she was house-sitting for the poet W. H. Auden and his partner, Chester Kallman, who liked to spend half the year in Ischia, off the coast of Italy. Cynthia, a Philadelphia debutante and Radcliffe graduate, didn’t like the dirty Bowery or Auden’s dirty apartment, though the worst part by far was her roommate: Maggie. “I don’t want a strange man coming here overnight! How dare he!” the latter railed in one case, when Cynthia proposed letting an old friend, Tony Bailey, sleep over while in town from Connecticut. Though Cynthia was formidable in her own right, she was so taken aback by the older woman’s fury that she allowed herself to be browbeaten. The whole summer was like that. Meanwhile Roth and her husband bumped into each other in Paris and whiled away the afternoon in a café. “Too bad there’s not a war on,” Roth laughed. “We could send the girls letters about how hard life is here in Europe.” “All I care to say is that the portrait Philip painted of Maggie in his later novel [My Life as a Man] was quite an accurate one,” Cynthia noted. She remembered Roth asking her—at a time when he and Maggie were freshly estranged—“Why didn’t you warn me?” Said Cynthia in 2015, bitter still: “I didn’t because neither man” (Roth or her ex-husband) “paid any attention to me or cared what I thought and never thought to inquire how my summer had gone.”
Soon after his return, Roth finally cracked The New Yorker. Fiction editor Rachel MacKenzie had been cultivating him ever since reading “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” in the November 1957 Commentary, struck by its congenial blend of “humor and seriousness.” Roth reminded her that his then agent McCrindle had already sent the magazine a version of “Epstein”—which, not surprisingly, was found to have too much shmutz, whereas Goodbye, Columbus was too long (and dirty enough in its own right). The first piece they bought was a brief “casual” for the back of the magazine, “The Kind of Person I Am,” inspired by partygoers in Hyde Park who presume to pigeonhole the author—“Oh that’s the kind of person you are”—based on the books he reads and so forth (“They’re so goddamned infuriating,” Roth wrote the Maurers, “not to mention boring, that I wrote this piece”). Around this time Roth also finished “Defender of the Faith” and was certain it was “the best thing I’ve done.”* On October 6, 1958, MacKenzie wrote Roth: “I shall be grieved and distressed if it doesn’t go through—I felt, reading it, that special excitement you feel when you come on a first-rate, perfectly controlled story—but it may offer problems for us.” There would, in fact, be problems galore, but for now the story had found its way into Mr. Shawn’s briefcase and was finally bought, on October 27, for a staggering $2,200.
The story is neither “sensitive” nor leavened much with humor, and hence Roth’s enduring satisfaction with it; the notion of Jewish solidarity has rarely been so pitilessly tested in the nuanced light of human nature. “Let the goyim clean the floors!” Private Grossbart cackles, overheard by his sergeant, Nathan Marx, a decent man who has released Grossbart and two other Jews from barracks-cleaning duty so they can attend shul. So convincing is Grossbart’s piety, at other times, that Marx can hardly believe his ears, and soon his tribal fellow-feeling is tested again when Grossbart complains about the trafe (non-kosher food) the army makes them eat: “ ‘That’s what happened in Germany,’ Grossbart was saying, loud enough for me [Marx] to hear. ‘They didn’t stick together. They let themselves get pushed around.’ ” It’s the summer of 1945, at a training camp in Missouri; both Marx and his gentile captain, Barrett, have survived terrible combat in Europe, and the captain, at least, is astonished by Grossbart’s audacity about the trafe.
“Do you hear [Marx] peeping about the food? Do you? I want an answer, Grossbart. Yes or no.”
“No, sir.”
“And why not? He’s a Jewish fella.”
“Some things are more important to some Jews than other things to other Jews.”
Barrett blew up. “Look, Grossbart. Marx, here, is a good man—a goddam hero. When you were in high school, Sergeant Marx was killing Germans. . . .”
But Marx himself is all too susceptible to what seems, at least, a sincere sense of entitlement. And Grossbart doesn’t hesitate to impugn his character, in the most galling way imaginable, to get what he wants:† “I’ve run into this before . . . but never from my own!” he says, when Marx hesitates to give him a pass (“No passes during basic”) so he can have a proper Seder meal with relatives in St. Louis. “They say that Hitler himself was half a Jew,” Grossbart persists, before bursting into tears. Lest he seem Hitlerian even to himself, Marx goes so far as to sign passes (in the captain’s name) not only for Grossbart but his two buddies, and is rewarded with an egg roll rather than the gefilte fish he requested. There was, in fact, no Seder; the whole ruse—Hitler and tears—was for the sake of a day’s escape to a Chinese restaurant. In the end, however, Grossbart is left weeping in earnest, when Marx thwarts his ploy to get out of being sent to the Pacific with the rest of his company. “There’s no limit to your anti-Semitism, is there?” Grossbart rages. “You really want me dead!” “You’ll be all right,” Marx says, repressing an urge to seek pardon for his not inconsiderable vindictiveness.
While waiting for a verdict from The New Yorker, Roth had immediately started work on another long story about a conscience-stricken Jew, “Eli, the Fanatic.” “It may be great,” he wrote Solotaroff after finishing a fifty-two-page draft. “Then again, no.” Roth’s ambivalence would later curdle into loathing for a story that, arguably, became his most popular: widely anthologized and taught, especially in Israel, as a fable portraying the failings of the Diaspora. The idea had come to him in a curious way: Maggie’s mother was the advertising manager for the South Haven newspaper, and a friend of hers—a young Jewish reporter who’d since moved to New York—had told Roth about a Hasidic group that started a yeshivah in a local suburb, unsettling its more assimilated Jewish residents. By way of research Roth visited a yeshivah in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn with his old Chicago friend, Herb Haber, who’d grown up there; Maggie went along but had to wait outside, so the boys wouldn’t see her.
In Roth’s fictional Woodenton, New York, three years after the war, a yeshivah has been established by some refugees including the director, Tzuref, and a silent young man (“a regular greenhorn”) in a black suit and hat. Eli Peck, a harassed young lawyer, is sent to the yeshivah as an emissary. “The stores along Coach House Road tossed up a burst of yellow—it came to Eli as a secret signal from his townsmen: ‘Tell this Tzuref where we stand, Eli. This is a modern community, Eli, we have our families, we pay taxes.’ ” The main problem is the greenhorn’s grungy, Old World outfit; the Jews of Woodenton have been allowed to buy property there only since the war, and are afraid that any hint of “extreme practices” will offend their Protestant neighbors. “Certainly such amity is to be desired,” Eli writes Tzuref. “Perhaps if such conditions had existed in prewar Europe, the persecution of the Jewish people, of which you and those 18 children have been victims, could not have been carried out with such success—in fact might not have been carried out at all.” Tzuref’s reply is brief: “The suit the gentleman wears is all he’s got.” All he’s got means exactly that: the man escaped the tragedy of Europe with nothing but the clothes on his back, and the disparity between his desolate condition and the prosperity of Eli and his neighbors—between European and American Jews generally—suggests an almost unbearable absurdity; the man in the black suit, whose face is “no older than Eli’s,” piques a part of the latter’s conscience that suspects he doesn’t “deserve to be happy,” as his wife puts it. The better to remind his Jewish neighbors, then, that they are Jews, just like the myriad dead of Europe, Eli appropriates the greenhorn’s suit and walks from one side of Coach House Road to the other, saying “Sholom” to the president of the Lions while his friends murmur about previous nervous breakdowns.
Roth would often describe the creative process as a kind of dialectic—a given book or story is conceived in reaction to the one that preceded it—and “Eli” seems to have been written somewhat in penance for “Defender of the Faith”: instead of a pathologically selfish Jew who exploits the tragedy of his people for personal gain, we are given, in Eli, an anti-Grossbart burdened by a mad (or seemly) sense of guilt. From the beginning, though, Roth worried he’d swung the dialectic too far in the opposite direction, beyond the point of mawkishness, and for hours a day he “bang[ed] away” at his typewriter, torturing a story that “should be brilliant, but isn’t.” “There’s a point at which banging becomes tiring, malicious, and immoral, and I just about reached it today,” he wrote the Rogerses, fully a week before he relinquished the thing to Starbuck. “Eli moved the people who read it here,” his editor reassured him, “and when I mention that you may still be working on it, they give me the worried look I’d give Hemingway if he told me he had decided to beef up The Killers a little and deepen the characterization.” MacKenzie, however, rejected “Eli” for The New Yorker: “We all agree that there are remarkable things in the story, but we feel that it keeps sliding off into caricature and farce and that in the end it falls between realism and didactic modern fable, the emotional thread breaking and the lesson taking over.” Such a critique conveyed something of what Roth would ultimately say in more damning terms; however, when Commentary accepted it for their April 1959 issue—only a month before publication of Goodbye, Columbus, the book, for which it served as the final story—he decided, at least for a while, that he liked the thing after all.
WHILE IN EUROPE Roth got word that he’d been turned down for the Stanford Fellowship (“which is stupid on their part, but fuck em”)—another reason to spend the year in New York. For the first two months he stayed with his parents in Moorestown during the week, which soon palled for the usual reasons, now including Herman’s chagrin over his son’s decision to leave teaching and make a living as a writer (“He’ll starve!”). After a few weekends of searching, Roth found a “delightful” two-room basement apartment on East Tenth between Third and Second Avenue, catercorner to St. Mark’s Church and a few blocks away from the famous kosher dairy restaurant, Ratner’s, in the heart of Little Ukraine. The rent was only eighty a month, and after whitewashing the rooms and buying some Salvation Army furniture, he moved in on November 1.
As Roth pointed out in The Facts, “these were the most triumphant months of my life.” In early October he’d been put up for a week at the Parker House, in Boston, while he met Paul Brooks and company at Houghton and went over his book (“page by page”) with Starbuck, who proved an excellent editor. Back in August, when Roth had written Starbuck to accept Houghton’s offer, he mentioned that he had a new story he was eager to show him, “Defender of the Faith.” Starbuck was so impressed he decided to cut “Vandals” and “Aaron Gold” in favor of stories with a more explicitly Jewish focus. As Roth later remarked, “George, in a way, determined my future, because I didn’t think that was my subject. I didn’t know what my subject was.”
At the age of twenty-five, Roth was on the brink of considerable literary fame and had made friends with some of the most prominent editors in Manhattan: Marty Greenberg, Bob Silvers, Gene Lichtenstein, and of course Plimpton, who promptly phoned to inquire how things had gone in Paris (“How’d it go, boy?”) and invite him to a big party. As Roth wrote the Rogerses a few days before moving to East Tenth, “Pass on to Brother Stern—subtly, of course—the party Maggie and I attended at George Plimpton’s last night: guest list: Joshua Logan, Irwin Shaw, Allen Ginsburg [sic] (and lover), Harold Brodkey, John Marquand, Jr.” The last became a friend: a regular of The Paris Review crowd, Marquand wrote under the name John Phillips to avoid confusion with his then famous father; he and Roth took to meeting a couple of times a week to walk through Greenwich Village to a Bleecker Street café, where they “mesmerized each other with descriptions of our wildly disparate social backgrounds.” Marquand was trying to follow up his moderately successful first novel, The Second Happiest Day, published five years before; when he died in 1995, at age seventy-one, Roth went to his funeral and wondered over the “great anguish” of a talented man who, try as he might, could produce only one more published book, Dear Parrot: Pertaining to the Care, Nurture, and Befriending of Man’s Oldest Pet.
Amid the deepening turbulence of his Maggie attachment, Roth would often fear that Marquand’s fate would prove his own, but in the early fall of 1958 he simply wished she’d go back to Chicago. More impressive even than the literary luminaries at Plimpton’s party, to Roth, were the gorgeous young women he longed to flirt with, if not for Maggie’s hawkish eye. Making matters worse, her Esquire job had ended without any prospect of another, and she was having trouble making rent on her “awfully small, awfully over priced apartment” on West Thirteenth. Roth’s stature in the literary world—soon to explode with Goodbye, Columbus—seemed especially to threaten her. As an unemployed, thirty-year-old (as of September 29) former secretary and waitress, she seemed an unlikely consort for such a handsome, promising young man, and, when put on the spot, she had a way of overplaying her bravado. At a party that fall, Roth found himself talking to one of his favorite critics, Leslie Fiedler, a fellow Newarker who remarked at one point that he had “five or six children,” as Roth wrote Solotaroff, whereupon Maggie earnestly inquired whether he was Catholic:
What a golden mouth she is. So Fiedler said no, and Maggie, unable to drop a scalding potato, says well a Protestant can have em too, and smiled. And shmuck that I am I come forth with a deathless two words: “He’s Jewish.” If you want to know what a conversation murderer it was try saying it aloud, with some volume, because others are screaming all around. So much for LF. He confided to Maggie later that EM. Forster was or is a homosexual novelist. Maggie, a rugged girl, pushed him on it, and said in effect he was full of crap. I turned at this point and talked to a pretty girl. She was stupid but straight.
Always it came back to the women. One night when Roth was impotent with her, Maggie flew into a rage about “all the girls [he] screwed in Europe,” and Roth was disinclined to deny it. Soon he began openly dating other people, and her demands for his attention took more and more bizarre forms, as when she’d end up in the hinterlands after taking the wrong subway and call him from a phone booth, “panting and incoherent, begging [him] to come get her.” He wanted desperately to be rid of her, but the possibility that she’d kill herself—as she threatened often enough—gave him pause. “It isn’t fair!” she said. “You have everything and I have nothing, and now you think you can dump me!”