CHAPTER
Fourteen
AT THE END OF JUNE—JUST BEFORE MOVING TO AMAGANSETT, Long Island, for the summer—Roth and Maggie took a road trip (in Herman’s Cadillac) to visit friends in Chicago and Maggie’s family in South Haven, a town that seemed as exotic to Roth as Bombay: “what made me so curious was that it was the backdrop for the grim saga of gentile family suffering that was hers.” They stayed at the home of Daddy Herb, Maggie’s grandfather, and his second wife (“Aunt Hervey”), and indeed slept in the very room Maggie had occupied for most of her childhood, after Red Martinson had proved incapable of keeping a roof over their heads. Roth liked the easygoing Herb, and the two sat out on the porch at night chatting about one thing and another (“never had no desire to visit no furrin country,” said Herb, when Roth mentioned their plans to live in Europe). Maggie’s mother, Evelyn, lived in a basement apartment close to her job at the South Haven Tribune; she neatly hoarded piles and piles of newspapers on every surface of her smoke-filled apartment, where two nicotine-addicted dogs (forever gobbling up her cigarette butts) kept her company in lieu of her long-gone husband. Roth liked Evelyn, too, and hardly recognized the chastened “victim” her daughter had described.
“Roth is the son-in-law of Mrs. Evelyn Martinson, TRIBUNE advertising manager,” the newspaper announced after their departure (“Author Married to Local Woman”), identifying Roth as “the son of Mr. and Mrs. Simon [sic] Roth of Newark, N. J.” and the recent recipient of an award given to him by “the Paris Review editor [sic], the Agha Kahn [sic].” Maggie’s marriage was well received by all, not only because her husband was such a promising young writer, but a Cadillac-driving Jew to boot, not unlike the other well-heeled Jews who descended on the town every summer. As Aunt Hervey liked to point out, “They’re dark ugly little fellas, Margaret, but they’re good to their wives and children.”
As a married man, Roth worried all the more about making a living as a writer and had been considering a return to the University of Chicago in the fall, or else trying for a job in New York so Maggie could stay on at Harper & Brothers. All that changed on April 9, when he was informed that he’d been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on his Frankfurt novel, The Go-Between. Requesting a grant of $4,100, Roth mentioned that Houghton thought his work in progress “lacks milieu and specificity,” so Roth thought a stay in Germany would be helpful; when the foundation gave him as much as $4,500, Roth decided on a more congenial venue, Rome, whither he and Maggie planned to travel aboard the Liberté after spending the summer in Amagansett, a safe distance (110 miles) from the distractions of Manhattan. Soon they found a charming plum-colored house on Montauk Highway, a duplex divided inside by a staircase and wall, for even less (seventy-five a month) than Roth’s little apartment in the East Village. Their landlord, Bill, lived in the other half of the house, and welcomed them to the neighborhood by walking them to the nearest bar—Roth’s “first experience of a gay bar.”
If anything, their social life was livelier and more literary than ever. Down the road toward the beach was the Irish Canadian writer Brian Moore, whose novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne Roth had read and admired; Moore was twelve years older but “never pulled rank,” and Roth was equally fond of his wife, Jackie. A bonus was the odd visit from their best Canadian friend, Mordecai Richler, a young Jewish writer, like Roth, with an acclaimed book that year, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; both men were given to a kind of antic spritzing (joking), albeit more boozily in Richler’s case. Another young writer who became part of the circle was Josh Greenfeld, a lonely bachelor who had a way of showing up at the Roths’ around dinnertime, or joining them and the Moores when they drove to Gosman’s fish store in Montauk, a few tables on a dock where the day’s catch was served. Finally, too, there was the writer Wallace Markfield: “The Country of the Crazy Horse” would rate an allusion in Portnoy and the author’s wife, Anna, would provide the beguiling Brooklyn accent of Paul Herz’s old girlfriend Doris in Letting Go. Markfield was working on a first novel, eventually published as To an Early Grave—about the late writer Leslie Braverman (based on Isaac Rosenfeld), “a secondary talent of the highest order”—which established whatever reputation Markfield would enjoy before fading away. As Roth recalled, “Wally was crazily intelligent, sardonic, wry, comic in the classic mordant Jewish way and, to my mind, a wonderful writer but one who never could marshal all his strength in one strong book.”
In Amagansett as in Manhattan, Maggie was intimidated by the high-powered literary company and would occasionally overcompensate by announcing that she was her husband’s “editor,” or pontificating about some aspect of Henry James; at other times, though, she seemed to run out of steam and become “extraordinarily mundane and flat,” as their friend Blair Fuller remembered. “Curiously, Philip is constantly pushing me, to read, to write, to study,” she wrote in her journal on October 6, 1959 (still in Amagansett):
In truth, out here I know I want most to keep house, cook, garden, read for pleasure and follow that proverbial life we both sneer at so. At the same time, more and more, among our friends I feel defensive about accomplishment. . . . There is no doubt that I’m filled with great anger still which is irritated by the demands made on me. . . . Obviously my therapy only quieted the storm and didn’t eradicate it. However, after meeting all those analysts this summer out here I feel even analysis is closed to me as a solution. I must keep treading water I know that but I feel such a strong desire to stop and that I’m drowning anyway.
The main psychoanalyst in their midst was an affable Canadian friend of the Moores, Bruce Ruddick, who practiced in Manhattan and spent summer weekends on Long Island with his artist wife, Dorothy, and their three children. Toward the end of that summer Roth’s parents had come for a visit, and one evening the Ruddicks stopped by for drinks, the six of them sitting outside on lawn chairs watching the sun go down. For about ten minutes everything seemed fine, but then Maggie began arguing with Bruce Ruddick—about psychoanalysis. As Roth remembered, his wife wouldn’t give an inch and finally “became so fierce and slighting” that Herman couldn’t bear it (Ruddick, after all, was not only a guest but a doctor). “Margaret,” he gently ventured, “as far as I can tell, you and the doctor aren’t really—” “Shut up!” Maggie snapped. An astonished silence, then Philip jumped to his feet: “That’s it! That’s enough! Go!”—and, uncharacteristically abashed, Maggie retreated to their bedroom.
Eager to assert some semblance of compatibility, Maggie had announced after the wedding that she wanted to convert to Judaism, to which end she’d taken her husband along to meet with a Reconstructionist rabbi, Jack Cohen, at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism on the Upper West Side. Cohen had given her a number of books to read, and Roth would point these out to visitors in Amagansett and make fun of his studious shiksa wife. “Maggie is hot into the Bible,” he wrote Solotaroff, “taking deuteronomy seriously, about how you can’t eat the pelican or any of the good things, and you should be nice to widows and divorced ladies, and you should have an altar 6X3X41/2 [sic]. Nothing like a nice authoritarian faith, if you have to have one.” All this culminated in a second wedding ceremony at Cohen’s synagogue that December, a “vulgar and ludicrous” business, as Roth would have it, that his parents attended with the usual bewildered politeness. Until her own Jewish funeral, Maggie would never again take part in any Jewish ritual or holiday or refer to Judaism, period, at least in Roth’s hearing.
Because Roth had gotten busy on a television script, they’d decided to stay in Amagansett through the end of the year, and after the other vacationers had departed, they were much alone together. Roth was at pains, as ever, to convey an impression of normalcy to their friends: “Maggie does a good deal of reading—she’s still studying to be a Jew—and exotic cooking,” he wrote in late October. “There’s a fine aroma of garlic in all quarters. There’s also TV, our first experience with it, and we have sat gloomy and frozen before some horrors.” Mostly, though, they fought. Roth remembered tossing a plate of sunny-side-up eggs at her head one morning (“You clean it up,” she said, after ducking), and in her journal Maggie wrote about trying to kiss him one night while he lay reading on the sofa: “Oh Maggie you bore me,” he said, pushing her away. Roth tried to make it up the next morning—squeezing orange juice and “kissing around”—but Maggie remained furious, until Roth accused her of being like Marty Greenberg’s wife,* who’d promised to leave him penniless when he asked for a divorce. “This again makes me feel that Philip’s affection and consideration come not from his heart but from his fear that I will divorce him and make claims that will tie him up for life,” Maggie noted.
Roth was preparing for Rome by studying Italiano Ultrarapido for an hour each night after dinner, whereupon he’d join his wife in the living room and they’d resume whatever quarrel they’d been having with their food. More and more, Roth would end up fleeing to the beach, where he’d walk for miles along the cold, black, crashing waves, feeling doomed. “One night around midnight,” he remembered, “I was so crazed by her unceasing opposition on every last issue that had arisen that day that instead of going to bed, I went out to the car and this time, rather than driving to the beach, I headed for Montauk.” Flooring the gas pedal, Roth had a vague idea of flying off the easternmost tip of Long Island into the sea: “I was not only indifferent to death,” he said, “I welcomed it.” On that point, at least, he and his wife were en rapport. “I do think more often about suicide,” she wrote that fall, “it seems to grow as a possibility although I really wouldn’t do it now I’m certain. That sounds contradictory but it’s just that suicide has an increasing fascination and I see it as finally my fate like something you want to do for a long time and won’t let yourself but you know in your heart that sometime you’ll have the opportunity and everything will be right and you’ll give into it.”
ALMOST TWO YEARS AFTER his first “flashy idea,” The Go-Between continued to give Roth fits. The more he plugged away, the more it occurred to him that he was at sea with the whole concept of what a novel was, or what he himself was supposed to be as a writer. “Every once in a while I write a line and think what Kazin said, then another line and think what Howe said, and then on the next say go screw them all,” he wrote Solotaroff. He’d begun to wonder if he’d ever be a novelist (“What patience you need, what faith”), when around midsummer he resumed writing about a place he actually knew: Chicago. Within two months he’d written more pages, two hundred, than he’d ever managed on the Frankfurt manuscript. His first Chicago novel, Distracted and Unblessed, was about a young man from a prosperous Jewish family who pursues an idealistic shiksa by volunteering for Henry Wallace during the 1948 presidential campaign. By September he’d put this aside to work on a second Chicago novel even closer to his own experience, Debts and Sorrows, and within a few weeks he had almost a hundred pages (“I’m flying”). Roth had been rereading The Portrait of a Lady, and was trying to cultivate a narrative voice more orotund than the near vernacular of Goodbye, Columbus (“I was writing a big novel and I wanted, as it were, a big and impressive voice”), as well as to approximate something of James’s gravitas (“the intricacy of motive; the gap between intention and consequence”). Starbuck visited Amagansett in November and subsequently wrote a memo to Paul Brooks, at Houghton, describing a manuscript that was already quite like the final version of Letting Go, with the climactic sequence about a botched adoption clearly envisaged by the author. “This is the expectable young autobiographical novel,” Starbuck reported, “but Roth is making it into something funny, touching, and quite original.”
But this, too, had to be deferred for a potentially lucrative project resulting from a meeting that summer with two TV producers. Fred Coe had discussed the possibility of Roth’s adapting “Defender of the Faith” for Playhouse 90, but reconsidered when he discovered how controversial the story was. Meanwhile Robert Alan Aurthur was trying to drum up scripts for a new dramatic anthology on NBC, Sunday Showcase, that ran opposite The Ed Sullivan Show (perhaps the main reason it lasted a single season). Roth soon had a first draft he was “crazy about,” though he worried it would prove “to[o] gutsy for the network.” Indeed, it seems fair to imagine that Roth’s teleplay, A Coffin in Egypt, might have been gutsy enough to end his career, especially in the wake of “Defender of the Faith.” He’d derived the idea from a recent article in Commentary about Jacob Gens, the Jewish head of the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania, who’d been responsible for rounding up a thousand Jews a month for the extermination camps. Roth was fascinated by the story’s moral complexity, though he could scarcely ignore its incendiary potential as a prime-time TV program. “I realize completely that the decision to help exterminate a thousand people a month is a big hot potato for the audience to swallow about a character in the first act,” he wrote Aurthur. “Well, it’s a big hot potato for the character to swallow about himself! For the Jews to swallow!” As the world would shortly learn from Hannah Arendt, Jews in Gens’s position felt tortured, of course, but also considered themselves to be like captains “whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo.” In Hungary, for example, Dr. Rudolf Kastner was able to save exactly 1,684 people—the wealthier Jews who’d bribed their way onto the so-called Kastner train to Switzerland—among the nearly half million deported to Auschwitz.
Roth didn’t stint on the moral complexity. The Gens character, Solomon Kessler, is naturally aghast when he’s given his mandate by a Nazi officer, Holtz, a decent fellow who likes Kessler (Roth wasn’t interested, he wrote Aurthur, in writing about another evil Nazi). As leader of the ghetto, Holtz explains, Kessler will be expected to round up a thousand Jews from “time to time” for the camps. “The Jew is the enemy, the Jew must die—those are Hitler’s words, not mine,” says Holtz. “You choose them, whatever way seems fair. The aged, the idiotic, the unemployed, vagabonds.” Kessler goes about his work, sick at heart, but when the first group of doomed, elderly Jews begins to rebel and shout “Murderer!,” Kessler steels himself:
KESSLER: Do you want a thousand, or ten thousand! . . . You! On the train! . . .
OLD MAN: What did I do? Why—
KESSLER: I don’t know what you did! You lived a life—come on! Come on! . . .
OLD MAN: I’m seventy-eight. Rabbi, who can be buried in a strange place? . . .
SMOLENSKIN [the rabbi] (in great pain, and with some confusion): “So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old, and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.” You remember? Joseph himself. Joseph himself had to wait for his sons to carry his bones to the homeland.
OLD MAN: I’m not Joseph, Rabbi. I’m me.
There’s little in the way of heroism among the Jews of Vilna—indeed most want only to save their own skins. When the sixty-four-year-old sexton is chosen for deportation, after surviving two years of winnowing, he reminds Kessler that the Russians are coming (“why should anyone go?”), and, when Kessler is unmoved, he points out that Rabbi Smolenskin is older than he: “You play favorites!” By then Kessler’s only friend is the Nazi, Holtz, who tries to persuade him to flee the retribution of his own people: “There’s a theory of Freud’s, Solomon, that the Jews themselves killed Moses. Well, you have been their Moses, their deliverer.”
It’s unknown what actor Roth had in mind for the sympathetic, Freud-reading Nazi, but he liked the idea of Montgomery Clift for Kessler—what with his “quality of nervousness, uncertainty, shlemieliness”—whereas Aurthur was thinking about Eli Wallach. That Aurthur was still soberly considering the project, after reading three drafts of Roth’s script, attests to its power; for quite a while, in fact, the man temporized—claiming that NBC would fly Roth back from Europe sometime that spring for production—but in the end wiser heads prevailed, and Roth was paid off ($4,000) for his trouble. “They were correct to turn it down,” Roth said fifty-one years later. “The fury it would have aroused in Jewish viewers would have been enormous. . . . But it was just that moral horror that excited my imagination.” By then Roth had a better idea of the backlash he would have faced, based on his own experience and that of Arendt, whose Eichmann in Jerusalem began appearing in The New Yorker three years after Roth had dramatized, in his teleplay, one of Arendt’s most inflammatory points: that leaders of Nazi-imposed Jewish councils (Judenräte) had been complicit in the genocide of their own people. Given also her theory that Eichmann himself was “a mediocre bureaucrat”—versus a monster whose evil beggars the imagination—Arendt became the focus of what Irving Howe described as “a civil war” among Upper West Side intellectuals, and (like Roth) was roundly reviled from pulpits all over the world as a self-hating Jew.
ON DECEMBER 22, 1959, Roth and Maggie belatedly departed for Italy aboard the Vulcania. Maggie wrote in her journal that “cabin class is shabby . . . and most of our fellow passengers are middle-income, middle-aged and middlebrow,” but, on docking in Cannes, she was delighted with their big elegant room at the St. Yves Hotel. They bought a car on arrival, a Renault, and spent the afternoon driving around the mountains overlooking the city. “Now we will rest and fuck [“fuck” crossed out; “make love” inserted],” Maggie wrote. “Last night we saw a movie with Bridgette [sic] Bardot, the first we’ve seen in which a breast and a man kissing it was revealed. It was very arousing.” The next day they drove on to Florence, where they stayed near the Uffizi at a shabby-genteel pensione “out of Henry James,” as Roth remembered (“eccentric elderly professors . . . spinster women”); Roth was happy to be back, even with Maggie, who seemed content to wander everywhere with him, despite freezing weather.
In Rome they found a “marvelous” four-room apartment on a little street, Via di Sant’Eligio, across the Tiber from Trastevere. As Roth wrote Solotaroff, “Our apartment has huge rooms and a marvelous view from my study—and our dining room—of the little dome of an old Raphael church [Sant’Eligio degli Orefici] and then the river, and above and beyond that, the Janiculum hill, green, with umbrella pines and elegant cypresses and even a lighthouse which flashes red, green, and white at night, and is supposed to light the way home for those guineas who have migrated to the Argentine.” Life, indeed, seemed a little too good to be true; even the tension between husband and wife—all but unceasing since that terrible episode with Bruce Ruddick in Amagansett—had dissipated somewhat.
Then Maggie announced she was pregnant again, the third (really the second) time in three years, despite her professed use of a diaphragm. This time Roth brooked no discussion; he found the name of an Englishspeaking doctor in the Rome American, and the man promptly arranged a D&C and even gave them a lift to the furtive location: “The following night we drove across black Rome with him,” Roth recalled, “past the steps of Santa Maria Maggiore—which I wanted to crawl all the way up straight into the arms of Jesus, certain that we were going to be busted and in Catholic Italia I would wind up in chains and serving on a road gang under the Sicilian sun for the rest of my life.” While a nice woman performed the procedure and their driver administered anesthetic, Roth sat in an outer office sweatily perusing Hudson River Bracketed, by Edith Wharton. Maggie was a little dazed afterward but regained her old strength by the time they returned to their apartment. “You monster,” she berated Roth, “you made me go through this! I’m bleeding now because of this! I know all you want to do is fuck other women and leave me.”