CHAPTER
Fifteen
THE PACE OF ROMAN LIFE SUITED ROTH. HE WORKED in the morning, and while everything was closed in the afternoon he took long walks or read; for about two dollars he and Maggie could eat a big restaurant dinner, and nobody tried to hustle them out the door while they lingered with friends getting “quietly high” on vino. Among the many congenial people they met in Rome were the Styrons, Bill and Rose: the two men knew and admired each other’s work, and Rose informed Roth that it was she who’d found “Conversion of the Jews” in The Paris Review slush pile. Bill had recently finished his second novel, Set This House on Fire, and until publication in May he had nothing to do but spend money and sit around the Caffè Doney “looking at the tarts.” After a few months of long, rollicking dinners and picnics in the Roman countryside, Roth reported to Bob Baker that his new friend Styron “was one of the first guys in a long time who I could talk to, and bullshit with, and feel easy about the whole thing.” Above all Roth could make Styron laugh, and one of his more intricate jokes would be recited at length in Sophie’s Choice by the title heroine’s flamboyant, schizophrenic boyfriend, Nathan Landau (partly inspired by Roth).*
Roth’s closest friend, however, was a writer—now utterly forgotten—named Robert V. Williams, who’d published one novel in 1952, The Hard Way, and was soon to publish his second (and last), Shake This Town. “Hot rod stuff,” wrote an unusually dour Kirkus reviewer about the first, “which is stepped up with sex and a certain surface suspense, for a questionable and certainly not quality market. P. L.’s [public librarians]—watchout.” Shake This Town would rate a slightly more polite notice from The New York Times Book Review, which mentioned its “stereotyped hoods” and tagged it “a fight novel.” Williams was ten years older than Roth and loved to regale him about his delinquent youth in New Jersey, with a drunken thief of a father who reminded Roth of Pap Finn. Williams’s wife, Harriet (“Hatch”), was a librarian from a more genteel background in Falmouth, Massachusetts; she would take a job at the University of Iowa library in the fall, when the Roths left Rome for Iowa City. “If you’re gonna live there, we’re gonna live there,” said Bob Williams, whom Roth described as “a responsible vagabond.”
At the American Academy, on the Janiculum, was that year’s winner of the Prix de Rome, Harold Brodkey, as well as the head of the Stanford writing program, Wallace Stegner. Roth’s loathing for Brodkey (and vice versa) was likely inevitable, though it didn’t help that Brodkey had sat behind him, mumbling derisively, during a lecture given by Bellow at an auditorium on the Via Veneto; Roth had turned around and asked Brodkey to be quiet, but the latter’s mockery had become, if anything, more gleeful. Afterward Roth wrote Starbuck:
He’s the first young man I have almost punched in the mouth since I was ten years old. But the season in Rome is young and he may yet go back to America toothless. . . . He said to me one night at a restaurant things like: “Well, of course I’ve read a good deal more than you have . . .” And then when I finally told him I thought he better be still he said, “I will not take instructions from you and certainly not until you’re a good deal better than you are.”
Stegner, by contrast, was solid and unpretentious; he let Roth know there was a job waiting for him at Stanford if he wanted it, and Roth was more than a little receptive. In the midst of his Roman idyll he was leery of returning to New York, and besides he’d never been to California and thought the change of climate would be good for his wife, whose sinuses had been killing her for more than a year. “See, you marry out of the faith, hoping to find a decent nose,” Roth wrote Solotaroff, “and they’re really no better than our own.”
Maggie’s sinuses were, of course, the least of their problems. Even at the best of times she couldn’t resist interrupting his work on the thinnest of pretexts (“Could you go out and get half a pound of Parmesan cheese?”), and Roth was ecstatic when a friend at the Academy offered him a studio to use while working on Letting Go. Outside that sanctuary, however, his marital rows became more and more ferocious (“even the Italians were in awe”), until Roth confided to Bob Williams that he was approaching the end of his rope. Bob and Harriet were about to leave for a weeklong trip to Sorrento, and invited Maggie along in the hope that things would simmer down a bit. “The next week alone in Rome was bliss,” Roth remembered, “though I did nothing but the most ordinary things.” “One forgets the pains of single life,” he wrote Starbuck on March 5, at the end of that halcyon week, “but one forgets some of the joys too.” In the same letter he thought to add: “Hey, who was nominated for the National Book Award? Not me?”
On Friday, March 18, 1960, a day before Roth’s twenty-seventh birthday, Starbuck satisfied his curiosity with an exuberant telegram: “DEAR GREAT WHOOP PHIL,” it began, and proceeded to quote the citation for that year’s fiction winner: “A novella and five short stories which depict with exhilarating freshness various aspects of American Jewish life in transition. This first book by a young writer is notable for its assurance, its rare high spirits, and its clarity of vision.” Starbuck ended with another “whoop” and asked Roth to cable some acceptance remarks for the ceremony on Wednesday.
Roth was the youngest writer ever to win, in any category, beating a strong field of fiction finalists that included Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, Faulkner’s The Mansion, and John Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (but not Allen Drury’s best-selling Advise and Consent, which would win that year’s Pulitzer). “Brendan Gill made my career,” Roth liked to say of the fiction judge who, in Roth’s certain opinion, had pushed hardest for Goodbye, Columbus.† Among the various women Roth had picked up in Europe during the summer of 1958, one, in Italy, had mentioned she was a former girlfriend of Gill; she urged Roth to get in touch with the New Yorker writer when he went back to the States, and sure enough the two hit it off over drinks at the Algonquin and a subsequent dinner on East Tenth. “It was the imp of the perverse that he chose this book for the NBA,” said Roth. “And that was when it began for me.”
His jubilation was short-lived. After cabling his parents the happy news (“HAVE WEAK BOWEL AS RESULT”), a second telegram from Starbuck directed him to buy a round-trip ticket (economy rate) for a Tuesday arrival in New York—thus his publisher had decided its handsome young star should collect his award in person, even if it meant flying him all the way over from Italy. “Between [telegram] #2 and #3,” Roth recalled, “all hell broke loose in my house.” “How can you dare go without me?” Maggie erupted. “You’ll fuck all those girls!” Roth tried to remonstrate: it was only an overnight trip, practically, and they simply couldn’t afford to go out of pocket on a second ticket. Et cetera. Nothing availed. Finally he sent a civil, despondent telegram to Starbuck: he couldn’t come after all; he’d composed a brief statement for the ceremony and hoped Starbuck would be the one to read it and accept the award for him. Starbuck, amazed, managed to get Roth on the telephone at two o’clock Monday afternoon: “Testy,” he noted of Roth’s tone. “Holding out for Maggie too.” In fact, Roth was enduringly furious that Houghton wouldn’t do its part to assuage his wife’s rage (“Gentlemen Wasps,” he later glossed), and meanwhile Starbuck was trying desperately to make things right: “Various calls to Candida Donadio,” he jotted for the record. “4:10 PM Monday Called Asher at Meridian, who called back at 5:05”—whereupon the haggard man sent a triumphant telegram (#3) to Roth, noting that Meridian had agreed to cover Maggie’s ticket.
Meridian Books was bringing out a quality paperback of Goodbye, Columbus ($1.45) with a classic cover design by Paul Rand: a red lipstick kiss with the title in white cursive below, amid blue stars. Aaron Asher—who would go on to edit Saul Bellow, Milan Kundera, and many others, including Roth at two different publishers—had joined a fellow University of Chicago graduate, Arthur Cohen, at Meridian when he first came to New York in the midfifties. As very few people would know until his death in 2008, Asher had lived his first eight years in Klaipèda, Lithuania, until a maternal uncle in Chicago, a doctor, persuaded the family to emigrate in 1937. Asher’s wife, Linda, knew nothing of this until she saw his birth certificate prior to their marriage; Asher quipped that he’d wanted her to love him for more than just his exotic background. Another person he told was his roommate at the University of Chicago, the future film director Mike Nichols, who’d also fled Hitler as a child. The trauma of Asher’s early years was evident in certain lifelong aversions: he was incensed by entertainments such as The Producers that found humor in Nazis, and considered Schindler’s List a ghastly piece of kitsch because it celebrated a “good German” as an emblematic hero of the Holocaust. As for his acquaintance with Roth, it had preceded the paperback deal for Goodbye, Columbus by a year or so, when Asher’s sister sublet a Chicago apartment from “a guy named Philip Roth,” as she wrote her brother in New York. “He says he’s a writer.” Shortly after Roth’s return from Europe that summer, the Ashers had come to dinner at his basement apartment on East Tenth, where they also met Maggie. “What the hell’s he doing with her?” they both said, in effect, on departing that night.
On Tuesday, the day before the ceremony, the Roths flew to New York aboard “one of those transatlantic murder birds,” as Roth put it; he’d become jittery about flying since his marriage to Maggie. (“National Book Award!” she hooted, when they finally emerged from a bad spell of turbulence. “Big deal!”) The other two winners that year were Robert Lowell (poetry) for Life Studies, and Richard Ellmann (nonfiction) for his biography of James Joyce, and the three were enjoined to give a press conference before the ceremony at the Astor Hotel; “they treated their questioners like well-intentioned, ignorant children,” noted a “Talk of the Town” item in The New Yorker, “and gave satisfaction to all.” Roth (“who had flown in from Rome a few hours before and looked as if he’d like a nice long nap”) was asked whether he was a product of the short story “renaissance” and replied with bemused courtesy that, as a young writer, he’d “naturally started with short stories, and now, at twenty-seven, he was working on a novel.” And no, he knew nothing about Ezra Pound’s recent return to Italy. Then a lot of photos were taken, including a few where the three men are holding a copy of Goodbye, Columbus between them, and another where Maggie is holding the book, smiling tensely, and Roth has a look of blank-faced exasperation.
“I’m bustin’ my buttons!” Herman said in the Astor ballroom, where he and Bess, Sandy and Trudy, and Aunt Milly were among an audience of more than a thousand (“the largest turnout the National Book Awards ever has known”), including a number of “non-prize-winning” authors who were introduced to the book-industry crowd by a “large female semi-literate,” according to Leslie Fiedler: “Even Ayn Rand’s mad glare could scare up no more than a ripple of recognition, while poor Allen Drury, doomed to win nothing better than a Pulitzer Prize, could not even muster a respectable hand to console him.” In those days the winners, announced in advance, were asked to prepare acceptance speeches, and at first Roth was stumped; then it occurred to him that he wanted to explain “why [he] didn’t want to say anything,” and this he did at length. As he would later recall the occasion—his first public utterance as a writer—“I burst onto the stage and I told them, ‘I am honored and delighted, and I accept your award with the highest of spirits.’ ” On the plane from Italy, he continued, he’d been reading about a recent Esquire magazine symposium at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where Ralph Ellison, Mark Harris, Dwight Macdonald, and Norman Mailer had been canvassed about “The Condition and Function of the Writer in Contemporary American Society.” Roth observed:
The concern is with writers instead of writing; the concern is with poses and postures, with etiquette, as if the manners of the writer ultimately determined the manner of the writing. . . . “Should the writer?” “Can the writers?” “Is the function of the writer in contemporary . . .?” Baloney! What questions! What a lightweight novelistic approach to human character! Imagine—should Jane Austen? Can Thomas Hardy? Is it the function of Sir Walter Scott . . .?
What would prove a rather characteristic diatribe “drew sustained applause from the audience,” so the Newark Evening News reported.
That night he and Maggie were invited to a party at the publicist Ben Sonnenberg’s Gramercy Park mansion, where Roth was approached by an attractive young woman, Jean Stein, who conversationally inquired, “Who’s your editor?” “George Starbuck,” he replied, whereupon Maggie yanked him aside and announced it was time to leave. But they’d only just arrived, said Roth, and there were a hundred or so people he wanted to meet. “Why did you tell that silly bitch that George Starbuck is your editor?” she snapped. “I’m your editor!” This was hardly the first time Maggie had made the claim, and it wasn’t entirely baseless. “She’s the only person alive for whom I change whole sentences in stories,” Roth had commended her in a letter to Bob Silvers (the point of which was to introduce her to an important “publishing” contact in New York and, he hoped, get her out of his life), and of course she did have a fair amount of experience as a reader and editor (textbooks mostly) at Harper & Brothers. As it happened, though, that wasn’t the main issue in the present case. “You wanted to fuck her!” she burst out, once they were back at the hotel. “If I hadn’t come with you to New York, you would have fucked everybody!” Roth—furious that she’d managed to ruin even this, the greatest triumph of his young life—declared that he wanted to leave her. “Try it,” she said, “and you’ll end up penniless just like Marty Greenberg” (“he said the thought of what Mrs. Greenberg is doing frightens him,” she’d noted in her journal); now that he’d won his big award he thought he could “run off with any stupid girl who fawned over [him] at a party.” Well, he couldn’t. He was married.
By the time Roth was slated to appear on “The Mike Wallace Interview,” he was notably poor company—“pugnacious,” as he described his mood at the time; and yet (given Wallace’s own reputation for pugnacity) he was determined to be “firm and thoughtful” and hoped both he and Wallace would emerge from the show with a measure of self-respect. It was not to be, though Roth could hardly have foreseen anything amiss given, say, Wallace’s assistant, a nice young man who had come to his hotel room the day before and diffidently asked a lot of questions that Roth considered seemly and decent for the most part. “Maybe we can get his back up,” the young man wrote in his memo to Wallace. Among his suggested interview questions (typed in caps) was this representative specimen, aimed at Roth’s contention that he wasn’t an “essentially Jewish writer”: “CRITICS HAVE SAID THAT YOUR HUMOR IS ‘TYPICALLY JEWISH HUMOR’, THAT YOUR RANGE IS ‘NARROW.’ COULD IT BE THAT THE THINGS WHICH GET YOU ANGRY ARE LIMITED, AND THAT YOUR SOCIAL CRITICISMS ARE LIMITED, SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO INVOLVED WITH THE THEME OF THE JEWS?” On the air, Wallace was sensitive enough to elide personal matters (“he doesn’t want to talk about fact that he married a shicksa” [sic]), and rather tried to be as offensive as possible on the subject of Roth’s work. “Reading your book,” he said, “I got the impression you don’t care for the Jews.” Roth, his back up instantly, replied that he “was under no obligation to care for them or not care for them,” and proceeded to rattle off the names of Jewish characters in his book that he happened to like. Wallace stopped him: none of their viewers would know the actual names, so maybe they should just move on. . . . “Hey, Mike,” said Roth, during a break, “you want to go after me or you want to talk to me?” The former, apparently; when it was over, though, Wallace gave Roth an amiable smile and complimented him on “being [his] own man.”
That morning Roth had met “a very sweet woman” from the New York Post at the Astor Bar. She mentioned a piece by Charles Angoff that had been widely printed in the Jewish press, suggesting that Roth’s work was “an exhibition of Jewish self-hate.” Roth gave the woman what he thought was a nuanced and politic response: Angoff, he said, was from an older generation of Jewish writers, and Roth thought the man’s time might be better spent writing “a piece of fiction about snot-noses like [Roth], and how they relate to his generation,” instead of “bilious articles” for Jewish community newspapers. A few weeks later, back in Italy, Roth received the woman’s piece (“The NBA Winner Talks Back”) from his clipping service: “My advice to [Angoff] is to write a book about why he hates me,” he was quoted as saying. “It might give insights into me and him, too.” As Roth reflected at the time, “I decided then and there to give up a public career.”
AS THE ROMAN WEATHER turned hot (“when you pass the whores on the street you can smell their underarms,” he wrote Baker), he and Maggie planned to leave toward the end of June, driving north through France and spending the summer in London. Roth jauntily informed friends that they’d stayed at the Eden Roc in Cap d’Antibes “like Dick and Nicole Diver,” perhaps remembering what had happened on a mountain road just outside Siena, where Maggie had suddenly announced, “I’m going to kill both of us!” and—à la the schizophrenic Nicole in Tender Is the Night—tried to steer the little Renault over a precipice. Roth managed to wrest the wheel away in time, but he had to stop the car and collect himself before warily resuming their long northward journey. “We drove up through the Rhône Valley in France,” he remembered. “It was spectacularly beautiful and I felt trapped with a woman who was mad.”
On arriving in the British Isles they were joined by the Styrons, with whom they hired a cab and toured Wales and Ireland. By then Set This House on Fire had been published to scathing reviews, though at least one had been quite positive, and this Styron kept in an inside jacket pocket and would furtively peruse (as Roth noticed in the rearview mirror) from time to time. While their wives went shopping in Dublin, the men embarked on a “Joycean trek” around the city that was supposed to wind up at the Guinness brewery, where they’d been promised a fascinating guided tour. On the way Roth remarked that the Irish were a terribly repressed people; if you looked directly at the women, he said, they automatically hid their bosoms (“he was right,” Styron noted). The brewery was closed, Trinity Library was covered in “hideous scaffolding,” the River Liffey was “full of mud and garbage,” and finally the two writers escaped a dreary drizzle by ducking into a shooting gallery and whiling away the afternoon playing pinball and mugging in photo booths. Later Styron would remember Roth’s “ability to convert these ghastly dead ends and moments of existential insult into an episode of both genuine gravity and high hilarity. It was one of the truly memorable days of my life, and among the most richly enjoyed.”
In London, the Roths were again fortunate in their lodgings, subletting a top-floor flat at 89 Redington Road, in Hampstead, from the rector of St. Mary-le-Bow. Their dining room afforded a splendid view of the city, and Roth was able to immure himself in a book-lined study. On nearby Flask Walk was the poet and critic Al Alvarez, then poetry editor for The Observer, a champion of contemporary American poets such as Plath, Berryman, and Lowell. “He’s in the same shit I am,” Alvarez observed of Roth, when he and his wife, Ursula, went to dinner that first time on Redington Road. As he later wrote, “We became friends from the start because both of us, back then, were edgy young men with failing marriages and a nose for trouble, who believed, as literary folk did back in the high-minded ’50s, that literature was the most honorable of all callings and were baffled when life didn’t work out as books had led us to expect.” The seeds of friendship would flower more fully in 1977—long after their “nightmare wives” (Alvarez) had vanished—when Roth began spending half-years in London only to find his domestic life as problematic as ever.
Meanwhile things were relatively tranquil in Hampstead until mid-July, when Maggie got word from Daddy Herb that a throat culture had revealed her mother’s lungs “were full of cancer,” and that she had “two weeks possibly three” to live. On July 17, Roth wrote Baker that Maggie had phoned South Haven “and decided finally not to go back on the advice of her grandfather, who says her mother recognizes no one, etc.” However, as Roth later remembered the episode, Daddy Herb had actually “pleaded with her to come back and be with her mother during the few weeks she was expected to live.” Roth offered to pay her way, but he couldn’t afford to go himself; they were on a strict budget and had already booked passage back to the States for September 1. “I’m not leaving you alone,” said Maggie. “You’ll fuck everybody in London!” “I was very sad to recieve [sic] your letter this morning,” she wrote Daddy Herb and Aunt Hervey on August 2. “Although I didn’t really believe the new medicine would do miricles [sic], I had selfishly perhaps, hoped it would keep Mother alive until I got there.” Amid furious bouts of weeping, she berated Roth for keeping her away from her mother’s side as she lay dying.
Truth be known, Roth hadn’t wanted to return to the States at all, much less to take another teaching job. “I want no part of the academic community, meetings, chickenshit, nonsense, politicking, etc.,” he wrote the Maurers from Rome on April 11. “Had enough at Chicago in two years to last me and mine for ever.” In a better world, he would have stayed in Rome indefinitely and had a string of Italian girlfriends; he was confident he’d get at least a $15,000 advance for Letting Go, and since he thought he could easily live in Rome for a thousand a year. . . . But reality was something else, and by April 18—a mere week after his exultant manifesto to the Maurers—Maggie wrote to inform Paul Brooks, at Houghton, that her husband would be taking a job at either Stanford or Iowa in the fall. That spring Maggie had learned that her first husband, Burt Miller, and his second wife were divorcing after only a year of marriage, and Maggie insisted that she and Roth had to get back to the States as soon as possible to save her “babies” from the sole guardianship of that “wicked simpleton.”
If Roth couldn’t have Rome, he’d at least hoped for the sunny climes of Palo Alto, but no: Iowa City was a few hours away from Maggie’s children in the Chicago area, so Iowa City it was. Explaining their choice to friends, Roth mentioned the advantage of proximity (“I think that’ll be good for everyone”), and also claimed the money was better at Iowa. In fact, the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Paul Engle—“a gonif ” (thief), as Roth would forever describe him—had offered him a mere $5,500 a year, “perhaps the sorriest salary in the history” of the Workshop, as Roth would learn soon enough; he even had to cover moving expenses and reimburse Engle for $125 the man had put down on a rental house for his new faculty member. To be sure, as the youngest-ever winner of the National Book Award, Roth was a hot property—but, after all, he’d approached Engle, not vice versa, and somewhat at the last moment too, so Engle figured he was doing Roth a favor.