CHAPTER
Seventeen
MAGGIE’S CHILDREN, RONALD AND HELEN, RODE THE train to Iowa every month or so. Roth and Bob Williams took them to football games, and over Christmas Roth and his faculty friend Vance Bourjaily went rabbit hunting with the twelve-year-old Ronald. At the time both kids seemed nice enough—especially the eager-toplease Helen—but Roth was still hoping to return to Europe after a single year in Iowa, all the more now that he was flush with Random House money. “So long as we are unencumbered with kids, I think we’ll try to keep on the move,” he wrote Solotaroff in October; “that is, live abroad someplace for a long stretch of time.”
Maggie had other plans. Leaving her children alone with that “monster” Burt Miller was out of the question; it was their duty as parents to make sure Ronald and Helen had a proper home. For the twenty-seven-year-old Roth, “duty” was as potent a word as ever, having much to do with “manliness,” an even more prestigious value; thus he “compounded [his] entrapment preposterously,” as he later put it, “assuming responsibility for two bewilderingly raised, love-deprived, parent-bereft, ill-educated children, ten and twelve, slates no longer clean and badly shattered, who were not mine and whom I barely knew.” That pretty much covered it. As for the man he would badger for custody rights, Roth portrayed him as the well-meaning rube Roy Bassart in When She Was Good, and would increasingly come to believe that Miller was a mostly innocuous dolt (“He bought that book How to Be a Dummy for Dummies”) who, like himself, had had the bad luck of getting in Maggie’s way. Certainly Miller blamed Maggie for Roth’s adverse opinion circa 1961: “Because of what Maggie told him, he thought I was an unfit father. . . . But he didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on.”
This is true, though not in the way Miller intended. Rather, it would have been hard even for Maggie to conjure just how badly things had deteriorated in Country Club Hills. On weekdays Miller commuted to his day job, in Chicago, as an art director for Libby, McNeill and Libby, where he specialized in mechanical drawings (lawn mowers, electric razors, and the like); then one day a subdivision neighbor—married to the niece of jazz guitarist Eddie Condon—invited Miller to play trombone at a nightclub in Chicago Heights, whereupon Miller began spending entire weeks, Monday to Saturday, away from Country Club Hills. “I had a great life,” he reminisced. “I would do it over again.”
For a while he left his children in the care of his young wife, Denise*—“a piece of work,” as her former stepdaughter Helen recalled:
[Burt] was going to do what he’s always done, which was to disappear and leave her with these two kids. I fared better than [Ronald]; I learned how to duck. . . . [Ronald] became a different person. He got angrier, and when he would talk back to her . . . she used to take metal rulers to him from my father’s art easel and hit him and hit him and hit him. It was terrifying. . . . I think she stuck it out for a year.
Country Club Hills was a recent development of mostly identical tract houses on otherwise featureless farmland; during the day a housekeeper would sometimes watch the children, who had to walk miles to school and back, but most nights they were alone together, or so they both remember. “I took care of my children,” their father insisted in 2013, twenty-five years or so after the last time he’d spoken to either of them. “They would tell you, if you ever met one, that I fed them pretty good and they loved the casseroles I used to make.” “Let me give you some hard facts,” said Helen (also in 2013). “When [Denise] left, the good news was that [Ronald] wasn’t getting beaten anymore, and I stopped shitting in my bed out of absolute anxiety.” Her brother made them brown-bag lunches each day, and when Helen came home from school she’d stay at a neighbor’s house across the street and play with their baby boy, who soon died of intestinal cancer. “It was a nightmare,” she said. “I did not see or have a parent in my life during the week at all. People go to jail for this. So I don’t know what kind of fucking casseroles [Burt] is referring to. We ate TV dinners every single night—and [Burt] didn’t make them; my brother did.” Finally the children got a surprise visit from Burt’s kindly aunt, Bea Walton, who looked around and “went nuts,” as Helen remembered.
Thereafter the Waltons paid to have someone pick up the children from school and watch them in their father’s absence, but still they were much alone together, and before long—when he was about eleven and she nine—Ronald, according to his sister, began molesting her. Things had begun innocently enough. Ronald explained to his little sister how babies were made, and for a while (“just being silly”) they would sometimes pretend to have sex. One night, though, he began choking her while trying to pull her pants down, until she squirmed loose and locked herself in her bedroom, then crawled out the window and ended up at the hospital after people had spotted her wandering around, coughing. Ronald said he “never had affection toward [his] sister” after she put the cops on him that night, and bitterly denied her allegations.
So things stood when Roth (scarcely guessing the worst) retained a lawyer in Chicago and worked to gain the children’s trust and persuade them, by degrees, that Maggie was not an unfit mother despite what their father had been telling them for years. “His torturing of Maggie has been without relief,” Roth wrote a friend; “at least, so long as she was single. My torturing of him is carried on at a higher plane—that is, I simply don’t get off his ass.” Miller corroborated this: Roth was “a real pain in the ass,” he said, always forcing him to answer some new pleading in court, until the two met face-to-face on the twenty-sixth floor of a Chicago skyscraper. “I took an immediate dislike to him because of his smart-ass demeanor: ‘Look at me, I’m a big shot!’ ” said Miller, who “came damn close” to throwing Roth out the window.
Finally it was decided—“after much expense and anguish”—that it was in neither child’s interest to remain in Country Club Hills with (or, most of the time, without) Burt Miller. Roth and Maggie wanted Helen to come live with them in Iowa City, and Helen desperately wanted the same: “She’s a sweet, lovely-looking little girl,” Roth wrote the Bakers, “who really needs at this point in her life to be rescued.” As for Ronald, a moody and often intractable twelve-year-old, he would continue his education that fall at a good boarding school in Chicago, Morgan Park Academy; Roth agreed to contribute to his tuition, but the Waltons would pay the bulk of it. Meanwhile both children spent the summer of 1961 in Amagansett, where Roth had rented a big house and arranged for them to receive tutoring.
Raised amid the hothouse parenting of ultrastudious Weequahic, Roth was unprepared for the almost total ignorance of his long-neglected charges: Ronald was barely literate and Helen not even that. “It was quite pathetic, and we were in a state of shock for a while because of it,” he wrote Solotaroff. “It just seemed a bottomless pit that we couldn’t even begin to fill. Neither of these kids has done an hour’s homework in the three years they have lived with their father! Can you imagine?” In Ronald’s case the need was urgent, since Morgan Park had insisted on intensive tutoring as a condition of admittance. Five days a week he met with Cora Zelinka, a schoolteacher friend of the Roths (married to Sid, a TV comedy writer), who tutored him in English and math; Roth supplemented their lessons with one-on-one talks about books and writing mechanics. In 1975, Ronald would remember these sessions in an interview with a Jewish community newspaper (“Papa Portnoy: Philip Roth as a Stepfather”): “I’ve got to say that if it were not for the positive influence Philip had on my life at that time, I might be in jail today.” The first book Roth had assigned to him was The Red Badge of Courage, which they discussed over a snack at the kitchen table; Roth explained basic concepts such as metaphor and foreshadowing, and asked the boy why Stephen Crane had written the book in the first place. “No, I wasn’t really into having a parent,” Ronald told his 1975 interviewer, who’d wondered whether Roth’s manner had been fatherly, “and Philip was perceptive enough not to try to force this kind of relationship on me.” Roth readily admitted he’d never felt much in the way of affection for the boy (“he was emotionally goofy, far from quick-witted, didn’t like being touched”), but he was unfailingly patient even toward Ronald’s more repellent lapses—as when the boy affected a swastika, until Roth made him read Uris’s Exodus and also took pains to describe certain Nazi atrocities as they’d transpired at the Nuremberg trials. Withal he was touched by Ronald’s “sad air of an outsider” despite his efforts, and was fatherly enough to explain a few key facts about sex. “Philip was the first person to tell me that people had intercourse for fun, not just to have babies,” Ronald remembered. “On masturbation, Philip quoted this Harvard dude who said that 98 percent of everyone masturbates and the other 2 percent lie.”
“Maggie’s rapport with [her children] was just about nil,” Roth later claimed, though Helen disputed this in her own case. After the dread odyssey of San Antonio and Country Club Hills, her mother and she were “strangers in some ways,” said Helen, though Maggie tried to make up for lost time; almost every day in Amagansett the two would sit under a tree, the little girl’s head in her mother’s lap, while Maggie read to her from The Secret Garden and Charlotte’s Web. Ronald was another matter. “His father has made special use of him,” Roth noted at the time, “and did such a fantastic and ugly job of turning him against Maggie, that it made a good deal of our summer a nightmare.” Ronald would later insist that Burt had never said a bad word against his first wife,† and indeed had a way of “wistfully look[ing] at the ceiling” whenever he spoke of her. Maggie “tried to destroy everyone in her path,” Ronald said in 1975. Both he and Burt remembered a time in Chicago when she’d slapped the boy so hard she bloodied his nose (Burt responded, he said, by shoving her against a tree and threatening to “break her goddamn neck” if she ever did it again), whereas in Amagansett Maggie struck her son with a bicycle pump. “I had to stop her from hitting him a second time,” Roth remembered.
That fall the Roths moved to another rental house in Iowa City (sublet from the philosopher Gustav Bergmann), and Philip got a more vivid sense of the challenges posed by his stepdaughter. The night before Helen’s first day of school, he went to kiss her good night and remind her to set her alarm clock, and the girl diffidently informed him that she couldn’t tell time. He already knew she couldn’t read, add, or subtract. “She was drowning,” he said. “I thought it was my job to save her. . . . She was so sweet, so willing, she’d been so fucked over.” It didn’t help that Maggie was ashamed of her daughter’s incompetence and would berate her whenever they sat at a table trying to do homework (“the last thing a kid needs who is struggling with reading and writing,” said Helen, “is having a parent disappointed and pissed at them”). Maggie was pleased, however, when she learned that her daughter had a very high IQ (“Your IQ is higher than Philip’s!” she announced), and Roth in turn proudly wrote friends about the girl’s “whopping I.Q.” despite what he’d previously reported of her illiteracy. Because Maggie wasn’t up to it, Roth took over the job of helping Helen with homework after dinner and would also read bedtime stories with her. “He did take on the task of teaching me how to read, and he was incredibly patient,” said Helen, still emotional about things in late middle age. As a girl she’d particularly loved a book of Russian fairy tales that she and Roth read many times (“with a blue cover, and a bird on this cover”); after every sentence Roth would pause and help her break it down. “Each little pebble of success that I had,” she said, “warmed me to him and he to me.”
“It was my husband’s opinion that the child was mental retarded [sic],” Maggie testified in a 1963 affidavit, “and he wanted to put her in a special school when we came East. I resisted this proposal, however, and Helen was sent to a reading clinic five days a week as well as to the public school. She has improved greatly and many of our friends were astonished that Philip was so ready to see her as a moron.” “He was very devoted to that youngster, and he wanted to help her like crazy,” said Howard Stein, an Iowa drama professor and Roth’s best friend (next to the Williamses) that second year. “It was terribly painful for him. . . . And her mother wasn’t too responsive.” After that first semester, Roth reported to the Maurers that Helen had been attending the Reading Clinic—a program connected with the university’s School of Education—for an hour each day before school, and “now likes to read books—amazing!” Later Helen would agree the program had been “a godsend,” and pointed out that Roth, not her mother (“Maggie would not do it,” Stein affirmed), was the one who got up at five thirty every morning to drive her.
Quite apart from what he figured to be his duty, Roth enjoyed the girl’s company. As she began to overcome her shyness, she smiled and laughed easily and was a genial companion to his friends and their children. Not only would Roth take her to school in the morning but he also liked meeting her afterward and walking her home, and it was he who took her trick-or-treating and even drove her friends home from Brownie meetings and so forth. “I began to thrive,” she said, on “finding out what it was to have a good father.” Next to her bed was a tchotchke shelf with little animal toys and other treasures Roth had given her every so often (“Pick a hand”), and soon the girl felt secure enough to tell him she loved him. “[Helen]’s presence has really taught the two of us (Maggie and I) so much,” Roth wrote the Maurers, “that I could go on for fifty pages about it,—and maybe someday I will.” Maggie, in her journal, recorded that her daughter was “getting prettier by the moment,” and Maggie also noticed the easy affection between her husband and Helen—the way they snuggled in a chair while reading, or held hands while walking together. “Driving back alone with me from the beach one hot afternoon,” Roth remembered in 2014, “squeezed up against me in her wet bathing suit after the two of us had rolled for several hours through the heavy surf with [Helen] safely clutched to my chest, she lifted her child’s face like a little leaf all juiced up on photosynthesis. ‘Kiss me, Philip,’ she said, ‘the way you kiss Mother.’ ”‡ Unlike Swede Levov in American Pastoral, Roth did not oblige her, and he would have been wise, too, not to mention the episode to his wife. One day he and Helen spent a raucous afternoon raking leaves and singing nonsense songs (“Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, my encyclopydea, oh Lydia the tattooed lady”), while Maggie watched balefully from the kitchen; later, after Helen had gone to bed, she turned on Roth: “If you ever fuck my daughter,” she snarled, “I’ll drive a knife right down into your heart.”
GIVEN HIS FR AUGHT HOME LIFE, Roth would always be a little amazed that he’d managed to write a long (950 pages in typescript) novel of which he remained more or less unashamed. “I had managed to write a full-length novel full of strongly drawn portraits of men and women, told from multiple perspectives, and grounded in serious moral themes,” he retrospectively assessed. “I had set out to demonstrate my maturity as a writer.” On October 8, 1961, Roth announced that the book was finished after two years and two months of almost incessant labor—then immediately began to panic (“sure I’d never put down another word again”) and returned to the manuscript for another two months, rewriting an ending that Random House had considered a little too bleak. Finally, when that was done, he wrote the story about injuring his back in the army, “Novotny’s Pain,” and promptly sold it to The New Yorker.
“Philip is such a seer,” Maggie wrote in her journal on December 28, noting this latest triumph. “I suppose this is a sort of pinnacle in our lives too for everything P. does seems to succeed and we’re making more and more money and even getting happier I think. I seem to feel happier with him and he behaves as though he’s happy too. I’m always melancholy though, it’s in the blood.” Roth was only too aware of his wife’s melancholia and its various harrowing forms, but he was about to embark on a “gala week” in the East and was feeling his oats, all the more given that Maggie, for once, had to stay home and care for her daughter. Amid delivering lectures at Princeton and NYU, and dropping his novel off at Random House, Roth ran into a former Playboy Playmate, Alice Denham, whom he’d met once at a literary party (Maggie in tow). This time he promptly arranged a tryst at her apartment the next day, and, after a long afternoon of sex, mentioned he’d be in town for another week and would certainly call again. On sober second thought, however, he decided to leave well enough alone.
Alice Denham (Miss July of 1956) enjoyed the distinction of being the only Playmate ever to publish a story in the same issue as her centerfold, and her roster of sexual conquests—Norman Mailer, William Styron, Nelson Algren, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, et al.—is a veritable who’s who of postwar American literature. When she later published a memoir about this aspect of her career, Sleeping with Bad Boys, Roth couldn’t bear to read it “for fear of how [he] measured up (or down) in bed against these drunken literary mastodons.” But he needn’t have worried: “Philip Roth was a sex fiend,” she wrote. “He moved from tits to—aaaah!—so fast I was breathless. Speeded up like his talk and his head. But once he got there, he hung in long and steamy. Tepid men never move me. Philip was on fire.”
Meanwhile, at Princeton, Roth met the head of the writing program, R. P. Blackmur, who subsequently offered him a job as writer in residence for the 1962–63 academic year. He also met his new celebrity publisher, Bennett Cerf, a regular panelist on TV’s What’s My Line? Finally Roth bought sweaters for Maggie and Helen before returning to Iowa City.
About two weeks later, on a sunny snow-laden day, Roth came home from campus after lunch to find his wife waiting for him in a rage. “You son of a bitch! You filthy cheating dog! You’re worse than my fucking father!” When she paused for breath, Roth asked what it was all about, whereupon she showed him a card (later Exhibit A in Roth v. Roth) that she’d opened from Alice Denham, on which was printed a Dürer woodcut of a man leading away a downcast woman (caption: “The twelve months have gone. Come on, Gredt, we’ll start again”); Denham’s note was brief: “Chicken! /—Alice.” In 1966, Roth wrote Baker that Maggie’s grand remonstrance went on “for three days running,” an ineffable ordeal that he would later abridge to a mere ten or fifteen minutes—until, that is, he’d “had it with the fucking assault, which was at the same pitch of crazy intensity whether I’d said the wrong thing to the waiter at a restaurant or stuck up a bank.” Yes, he confessed, yes, he had indeed fucked Alice Denham in New York; then he went upstairs, packed his toilet articles and some underwear, announced “I’ve had enough of you,” and walked out the door.
He’d gone maybe two or three blocks when it occurred to him that Maggie would try to kill herself and Helen would come home from school and find her mother’s body. Sure enough, when he returned, she was sitting on the floor in her underwear; a whiskey bottle and empty pill vials were nearby. “I’m going to die,” she said, “I want to tell you something.” Roth dragged her to her feet and upstairs to a bathroom, where he put his finger down her throat and made her throw up. Then he put her in bed. “I’m going to die,” she repeated, and proceeded to tell him that she hadn’t really been pregnant just before their marriage; she described her transaction with the pregnant black woman in Tompkins Square Park, and so on. “I was completely stunned on learning of her deception,” Roth observed in his own affidavit for the divorce case. “Our marriage had been three years of constant nagging and irritation, and now I learned that the marriage itself was based on a grotesque lie.” Roth sat in the corner of the bedroom, calmly taking it in; a two-word phrase he sometimes liked to tell himself (“when confronted by great surprises of an unhappy nature”) seemed to apply: “This, too.”
Roth phoned Bob Williams and asked him to pick up Helen from school and give her dinner. Then he returned to his chair in the bedroom. Soon Maggie fell asleep, and didn’t die. At last he retrieved Helen and gave some excuse to the Williamses for the snafu. “I couldn’t tell anyone,” he remembered, “—it was all too lurid.”
That spring Maggie and he slept in separate bedrooms, and Roth began having an affair with one of his students—an attractive, talented twenty-two-year-old, Lucy Warner. The young woman had caught Roth’s eye before, but in light of Maggie’s revelation he gave himself permission to pursue her.§ Lucy was an undergraduate who’d been promoted to Roth’s graduate workshop that spring because, as she recalled, one of her stories had been accepted by The Atlantic. Like Roth, she was rather at emotional loose ends. The previous year she’d eloped, disastrously, with another writer at the Workshop, and spent the rest of that school year as well as the fall semester in New York, disentangling herself. Both she and Roth vaguely remember his writing “See me after class” at the top of one of her papers; then he took her for a wary walk or for coffee (“he was very terrified of our being seen together”) that eventuated, either that day or soon after, in their sleeping together at Warner’s apartment.
Roth was in love. Amid the tense atmosphere at home, he’d sometimes spring to his feet and announce he was taking a walk, then flee across the river and up a long hill to Warner’s second-floor apartment on East Burlington, where he’d skittishly hang sheets over the windows (no curtains) before getting into bed: “Cheever used to swim across Westchester County,” he said; “I used to run across Iowa City.” Roth’s feelings were mostly reciprocated; Warner’s friends at Iowa had been her short-lived husband’s friends, and now she was alone. She remembered the young Roth as “skinny and nervous and funny” and of course “very smart” (the only person with whom she could ever discuss Italo Svevo): “I didn’t feel any rough edges,” she said. “I did later, but not then.” Though he was careful not to burden her with any but the most salient grotesqueries about his marriage, she saw how desperate he was and liked the idea of giving him a haven. “I was always so overjoyed to see him, and felt kind of cherished.”
By then Roth had already arranged to rent a house in Princeton the following year for Maggie, Helen, and himself, and had also rented a summer place in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, near some Iowa friends, the painter Jim Lechay and his wife, Rose. That spring, however, he decided he couldn’t live without Lucy Warner. On her desk was a picture of her family home on an island in Maine, and thither Roth hoped to escape with her, sending Maggie to Wellfleet alone. Then he would devote the summer to getting out of his nightmare marriage and starting over.
GOODBYE, COLUMBUS HAD ALSO won the Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Award for “the year’s best fiction work of Jewish interest” from the Jewish Book Council,¶ whose jury tended to be professors and critics, albeit professors and critics who’d given the previous year’s award to Exodus. Roth’s strongest supporter on the jury was David Boroff, who later confirmed what Roth had been told by his friend Bob Silvers (who’d accepted the award on his behalf while Roth was in Rome)—namely, that the book was an unpopular choice among sponsors and others at the ceremony. BOOK AWARD TO ROTH “TRAVESTY” AND “INSULT,” read the headline of an editorial by the Jewish writer Nathan Ziprin: “It was a grave mistake for the Jewish Book Council to extend ‘Jewish interest’ recognition to a book that shows no understanding whatever of basic Jewish values or proper appreciation of the sensitive American Jew’s relationship to his heritage.”
It was Boroff who’d invited Roth to give a talk at NYU during his fateful trip east in January 1962. As Boroff would explain to an Israeli audience eighteen months later, only a few Jewish students had shown up for the occasion, though there were plenty of suburban matrons who “were very well groomed, formidably girdled, and eager for the attack”:
Indeed, Philip Roth has become a kind of shibboleth for American Jews; they define themselves and other people in terms of how they react to Philip Roth. In the suburbs, for example, there are always little cells, little revolutionary movements, of people who have read Goodbye, Columbus and are admirers of Philip Roth; and this sets them apart from the great mass of suburban people to whom Mr. Roth is anathema. . . . [I]t is a kind of an issue, a way of dividing the sophisticated from the non-sophisticated. You are given a choice: Leon Uris or Philip Roth.
As for gentiles, said Boroff, they regarded Roth as a “Baedeker, the guidebook to Jewish life”—which, of course, was the main rub among Roth’s detractors. “Why don’t you leave us alone?” they’d assail him after his talks. “Why don’t you write about the Gentiles?” David Seligson—a celebrated Reform rabbi at Central Synagogue in Manhattan, whose memorial service for JFK would be nationally televised—made headlines in June 1963 when he denounced Roth from the pulpit as a veritable paradigm of the “alienated Jewish intellectual,” whose “prize-winning novel [sic] Goodbye, Columbus, written about a Jewish adulterer”—he meant “Epstein”—“and a host of other lop-sided schizophrenic personalities, could hardly be said to be a balanced portrayal of Jews as we know them.” Given his concern with balance, Seligson (and others) might have mentioned the more admirable likes of Sergeant Marx, Eli Peck, and Leo Tzuref; as for Grossbart, Epstein, and Brenda Patimkin’s diaphragm, one is reminded of Isaac Singer’s reply to his critics: “ ‘Why do you write about Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes?’ [they asked me], and I said, ‘Shall I write about Spanish thieves and Spanish prostitutes? I wrote about the thieves and prostitutes that I know.”
While privately “bemused” by the vehemence of his attackers, Roth was determined not to back down in public. In March 1961 he and Alfred Kazin were invited to appear at a symposium at Loyola University in Chicago, “The Needs and Images of Man,” devoted to exploring the state of Catholic-Jewish relations (four years, that is, before the Vatican Council finally absolved Jews for their part in killing Christ). The gist of what Roth had said would be published in American Judaism as “Some New Jewish Stereotypes”: “I find that I am suddenly living in a country in which the Jew has come to be . . . a cultural hero,” Roth began, for the benefit of Catholics who congratulated themselves on reading Leon Uris, whose portrayal of the Jew, said Roth, as a kind of patriotic “warrior” was so silly that it was “not even worth disputing,” though he invoked the testimony of Captain Yehiel Aranowicz, the master of an Israeli refugee ship, in disputing it: “The types that are described in [Exodus] never existed in Israel,” said Aranowicz. Roth also said hard things about Harry Golden, whose maudlin comedies about virtuous immigrants on the Lower East Side (Only in America; For 2¢ Plain) were still popular at the time. Roth declined to show “Some New Jewish Stereotypes” to his mother, who was still trying to process the rumor that Morton Wishengrad, a playwright, had told the Newark YMHA that her son was a better writer than Uris: “much as she loves me,” Roth wrote a friend, “she just couldn’t give up her cool reasonableness. I was her son, but Leon Uris—after all!”
A far sterner test awaited Roth a year later at Yeshiva University in New York, where he’d been invited to appear on a panel, with Ralph Ellison and James T. Farrell, on “Conflict of Loyalties in Minority Writers of Fiction.”# “I accepted the job,” Roth noted three weeks in advance, “partly because I wanted to, partly out of defiance; I think it is a purposely provocative title, and it seems to me that somebody ought to take the smug bastards on.” Roth was piqued by the implication that minority literature was often controversial because of the moral failings of the writers themselves, versus certain insecurities on the part of their minority audience, who, he expected, would turn out in bloodthirsty force at Yeshiva. As it happened Farrell was replaced by a lesser-known proletarian writer of the thirties, Pietro di Donato, author of Christ in Concrete, who, like Ellison, mostly improvised his twenty-minute opening remarks; Roth, however, read from a carefully prepared script lest his remarks be misquoted or otherwise distorted as in San Francisco. Bearing in mind his status as a kind of “Baedeker” among gentiles, Roth alluded to “a rabbi and educator in New York City”—i.e., Emanuel Rackman, a political science professor at Yeshiva who’d wished for “medieval” justice in Roth’s case—who had charged him with the “sin of informing”:
[W]hat he is suggesting is that some subjects must not be written about, or brought to public attention, because it is possible for them to be misunderstood by people with weak minds or malicious instincts. Thus he consents to put the malicious and weak-minded in a position of determining the level at which open communication on these subjects will take place. This is not fighting anti-Semitism but submitting to it: that is, submitting to a restriction of consciousness as well as communication, because being conscious and being candid are too risky.
“Mr. Roth,” the moderator inquired, after the introductory statements had been given, “would you write the same stories you’ve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?” Which was pretty much the tenor of the barrage that followed. Roth’s interrogators seemed heedless of the fact that he’d already addressed the question in his prepared remarks, more or less, by pointing out that—contrary to Rackman’s assertion that his “informing” might endanger Jews—the United States wasn’t remotely analogous to Nazi Germany: The Holocaust “has taught [Rackman] nothing other than how to remain a victim in a country where he does not have to live like one if he chooses. How pathetic. And what an insult to the dead. Imagine: sitting in New York in the 1960’s and piously summoning up the ‘six million’ to justify one’s own timidity.”
“I was, in a way, surprised by the colossal brutality of the argument from the other side, and finally overwhelmed,” he wrote Solotaroff a week after his Yeshiva appearance. “[A]ll the strength just ran out of me, and I felt as limp as a rag.” Roth had considered getting up and leaving the platform, but that would be construed as defeat, and besides he hardly had the strength by then. “What’s going on here?” said Ellison, when he saw how battered Roth looked. Ellison pointed out that his own depiction of incest between a black sharecropper and his daughter—to name only one provocative aspect of Invisible Man—had infuriated black readers, but, after all, he wasn’t a propagandist. The Yeshiva students received this information politely, then resumed attacking Roth. When it was over, the dazed man was surrounded by a scrum of shouting detractors as he tried to leave. “You were brought up on anti-Semitic literature!” said one. “Yes?” Roth replied. “And what is that?” “English literature! English literature is anti-Semitic literature!” Afterward Roth sat with Maggie and his Random House editor, Joe Fox, at the Stage Delicatessen in Midtown, wanly consuming a pastrami sandwich. “I’ll never write about Jews again,” he said.
And yet he still hoped to be understood, after a fashion, or at any rate to forestall some of the usual “inanities” in the Jewish press by publishing his Yeshiva remarks as “Writing about Jews” in a subsequent issue of Commentary. “Roth attempts to defend himself in an article, which he has the audacity to call ‘Writing about Jews,’ ” remarked Rabbi Theodore Lewis of the Progressive Synagogue in Brooklyn in a letter to his congregation. “Roth never writes about Jews . . . Roth writes about more exciting and lucrative themes—adultery, sexual licentiousness, marital infidelity, lechery, and human depravity in general.” Meanwhile the letters to Commentary again came pouring in—notably from two of his most prominent antagonists, eager to return fire. “ ‘Look, folks, no hands,’ ” Harry Golden imagined Roth saying to his many gentile admirers; “ ‘I’m one of you; look how uninhibitedly I can write of Jewish bums, just like you would like to do but haven’t the guts.’ ” The redoubtable Rackman, too, reminded Roth, not unfamiliarly, that he’d “earned the gratitude of all who sustain their anti-Semitism on such conceptions of Jews as ultimately led to the murder of six million in our time.”