CHAPTER
Twenty
SHORTLY AFTER HE RETURNED FROM LONDON, ROTH struck up a friendship with the theater critic and Columbia professor Robert (Bob) Brustein and his wife, Norma, an actress, and soon fell into a routine of eating dinner almost weekly at their stately apartment on East Eighty-fifth. “You two bailed me out of a lot of loneliness,” he wrote Bob many years later, remembering how the couple would patiently listen into the wee hours while Roth fulminated over his wife’s iniquities. Roth was a few years younger than the couple—a “loony” little brother, said Bob, who could be counted on for laughs whatever his mood otherwise. Roth, in turn, was so dependent on sanctuary chez Brustein that he even showed up for a dinner party that had been scheduled—and tacitly canceled—on the night of the great blackout of 1965: “He arrived just on time,” Brustein recalled, “having solved the dead subway problem by walking up two miles of dark streets and the dead elevator problem by walking up eight flights of stairs.”
Through Brustein he met another funny Jewish guy, Albert Goldman, one of Brustein’s Columbia colleagues, who’d recently begun reviewing pop music for Life. Brustein had met Goldman in a graduate seminar taught by Lionel Trilling; a besuited dandy with carefully oiled hair, Goldman delivered a paper on Beethoven’s last quartets that left Trilling and the others rather stunned by its brilliant-seeming abstruseness. Outside of class, however, Goldman “turned into this completely other guy,” said Brustein. Cackling, Goldman told his fellow grad students that he supported himself by selling shingling jobs door to door—that is, by absconding with his customers’ down payments for purely speculative services. He and Roth had come from the kind of Jewish families that nurture neuroses and comic brio, and would shout over each other at the Brustein dinner table while other guests poured onto the floor laughing. Explaining a hand tremor, Goldman said his mother used to make him pick his father’s pocket. Sometimes, too, he would seem to hear this same woman’s voice (though she lived in Santa Monica) while eating his morning egg at Mayhew’s, a diner in the East Sixties: “Albert, your father and I have been worried sick about you!” Goldman would look up and see Roth “glaring at [him] maniacally”: “Two weeks and not a word. How is it a writer, a person who sits all day behind a typewriter, can’t put two words together to send to a mother who lives three thousand miles away?”
Ten years later Goldman would make his reputation with a brilliant biography, Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!!,* and meanwhile he also shared his interest in rock ’n’ roll with Roth, taking him along for concerts by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Fugs. One night, soon after Portnoy was published, he took Roth backstage at Madison Square Garden for an interview with B. B. King; Roth chatted a while before leaving to claim their seats, and, as Goldman told him afterward, King looked around at his entourage, rubbed Roth’s seat, and said, “That guy just made a million dollars from writin’ a book.”
Through his friendships with like-minded Jews, Roth rediscovered something that the scourge of Maggie had almost made him forget: he was a funny guy. With Goldman he discussed a Genet-like play he wanted to write, The Terrace, about a brothel for nice Jewish boys: a motherly whore would bathe and powder you, then put you in Dr. Denton kiddie pajamas and tuck you into bed, where you’d fall asleep listening to “a little radio with an orange dial.” The next morning a soft voice would call, “Wake up, dear, it’s time to get up.” For that, said Roth, he’d gladly pay fifty bucks a night. Another venue for such monologues was the Hotel des Artistes apartment of the Epsteins, Jason and Barbara—he an editor at Random House, she an editor at The New York Review of Books. Either solo or in tandem with the equally zany Jules Feiffer, Roth would sing and sing for his supper, riffing on Shakespeare and/or the dangers of answering a doorbell in New York. More and more, too, Roth was indulging in the pleasures of “reckless narrative disclosure” that he’d discovered on Kleinschmidt’s couch. One day, with Brustein and Feiffer, he was standing in the water at Lambert’s Cove Beach on Martha’s Vineyard, when, apropos of nothing, he began holding forth on the subject of masturbation. “It was truly gut-breaking, funny and shocking,” recalled Feiffer, who almost drowned laughing. As for Brustein and his wife, their copy of Portnoy would be aptly inscribed, “To Bob and Norma, who encourage me in this madness.”
Roth began tentatively mining this vein in his work, despite his post-Yeshiva vow never to write about Jews again. In early 1963 he started work on a madcap fantasy titled The Last Jew or The Jewboy, which he described to Bob Baker as “very promising, and very funny, and highly invented, and therein—the invention—lies the problem. How much is too much, etc?” That indeed was the question. The titular Jewboy is an orphan named Heshie who’s left in a shoe box at a Jewish old-age home, where he’s summarily circumcised by an ancient mohel. Over the next two hundred pages or so, Heshie is adopted by every manner of Jewish parent, including various mothers, a milkman, and a rich gangster, Taback, who teaches him that good rye bread is better than cake, and startles the boy by offering him shrimp. “What am I, Chinese?” says Taback, when Heshie mentions that he is, after all, a Jew. “Don’t you have a good time with me?”
“Life,” said Heshie, “life—”
“What about life?”
“It isn’t just good times,” the boy finally got out.
“Oh no? What else is it?”
By the end, the boy seems about to embrace Taback’s philosophy, lighting out on skates across a frozen Newark lake in pursuit of a shiksa called Thereal McCoy. “Don’t!” one of his stepfathers calls after him. “You’re skating on thin ice!” Heedlessly speeding ahead, Heshie replies, “Oh, you dope, Daddy, that’s only an expression,” as the ice begins cracking around him.
“You are a very funny Jew,” Joe Fox wrote Roth of The Jewboy, confessing however that he found the surrealism puzzling in parts. “Why Jesus and Mary?” he inquired of a digressive bit of shtick updating the Christmas story; in Roth’s version, the innkeeper calls the cops on Joseph, who’s startled when the police captain challenges him to compare testicles: “I’ll bet you anything you want that for sheer hang and weight, the average Gentile has got balls on him that run from one and a half to two times larger than the average Jew.” Roth marked this section with a folding tab of paper labeled “BALLS” (he would, in fact, find use for it later), and put the rest of the manuscript aside forever, give or take the odd detail. As he later explained, The Jewboy “tended to cover with a patina of wacky inventiveness material quite interesting in itself and, as in certain types of dreams and folktales, intimated much more than I knew how to confront head-on in a fiction.”
In the two-plus years since Letting Go, he’d managed to complete a total of three stories for publication, and the most recent two were neither funny nor inventive. Moreover he wasn’t writing about Jews, at least publicly, unless you count the offstage analyst Spielvogel, about whom Roth was considering a series of stories: “Like the York cycle of mystery plays,” he said, “a lot of people would have this doctor, but you’d never see him.” Spielvogel would, of course, emerge as the silent auditor of Alex Portnoy, but meanwhile he was mercifully dropped after a single bad story—“real shit,” said Roth—that appeared in the November 1963 Esquire, “The Psychoanalytic Special.” Inspired by Roth’s mooning over the loss of Lucy Warner while riding a thrice-weekly train from Princeton to see Kleinschmidt, the story gives us the maundering thoughts of Ella Wittig, as she too mourns the loss of a lover, Perry, while stuck with a merely dull husband, Michael. That adultery can make a bad marriage bearable was a theme Roth would revisit more memorably throughout his life and work; as for “The Psychoanalytic Special,” it deserves a decent burial amid the microfilm holdings.
The same may be said more emphatically of “An Actor’s Life for Me,” about another unhappy married couple, Juliet and Walter Appel, who comfort themselves with delusions of artistic talent. Playboy, perhaps, was paying Roth by the word—certainly he needed the money—which might explain why this static idea is belabored at such eerie length: eleven fine-print, multicolumn pages. Juliet despairs of acting and tries her hand at playwriting, whereas Walter despairs of playwriting and takes a job “in the business end of the theater”; thus Juliet affects to work on her play each night, while Walter notices (and notices and notices) a naked man peeping at her from an opposite window. “He should have forced her to have a child long ago,” Walter reflects, but doesn’t act until an umpteenth sighting of the naked man causes both of them to realize, at long last, that they might as well resign themselves to a more mundane, nonartistic domesticity: “he mounted Juliet,” the story ends, “[and] proceeded to reproduce himself.”
The witty prodigy who wrote the stories in Goodbye, Columbus had lost his way, and was himself pondering an alternative career as a playwright. Encouraged by Brustein and Howard Stein, Roth applied for a one-year Ford Foundation program intended to bring “established writers in nondramatic forms into formal association with the theater and . . . ultimately to improve the quality of plays and scripts available to American directors, actors and producers.” Winning the fellowship was a foregone conclusion for one of the best fiction writers of his generation, though Roth was disgruntled when the foundation saw fit to reduce his grant to $7,500 because of his separation from Maggie, cutting the $1,500 spouse allowance that would have covered all of ten weeks of alimony. Nor was he thrilled at the prospect of being “in residence” at the American Place Theatre on West Forty-sixth, as the fellowship required, the better for him to learn “stage problems and the requirements of dramatic writing” by watching other people’s plays. “It don’t sound like fun,” Roth morosely wrote Baker; “and if something else turns up I may wind up telling them to shove it.”
But nothing much did, so Roth again turned to playwriting. His first efforts were one-act farces in the fanciful mode of The Jewboy. The Fishwife takes place in “the near future,” and reflects Roth’s obsessive skepticism toward marriage. The middle-aged Howard is dismayed when his young wife, Gloria, announces she is taking a second husband in keeping with their brave new world of legalized polygamy. Because neither spouse can entirely requite the needs of the other, Gloria is affianced to a tango instructor while Howard admits he’s been secretly seeing a slatternly woman who shares his love of fish (Howard abhors tango dancing, Gloria fish). “Enough guilt,” he proclaims in the end. “Enough hating of our own authentic selves. . . . I see life stripped of the sham and the sanctimony, of the deceit and the hypocrisy, of all the poison and the ugliness—the smallness.” When Gloria takes him at his word, however, and mentions the prospect of a third husband, Howard is shocked and dismayed all over again.
Roth’s other farce, Buried Again, was “longer and more interesting” than The Fishwife, or so Roth thought at the time. A dead Jewish man, Weingast, appears before a reincarnation panel—four vaguely sinister types, including a woman with “a heavy Germanic accent” (Roth had Hannah Arendt in mind) and a bland goyish “Chairman” (Eisenhower)—who offer to return Weingast to earth as a gentile. Amid steadily increasing rancor on both sides, Weingast insists he wants nothing better than to resume his quiet life as a New Jersey Jew, until the panel flatly asserts that “mankind has had enough of Jews.” “Goys!” Weingast erupts. “You goy bastards!”—whereupon the panelists rise and begin banging gongs behind them, a gathering clamor that culminates in “a long horrible loud unmusical sound, a little longer than is bearable.” The end. Looking back over the decades at such efforts as Buried Again and The Fishwife, Roth decided that “nobody has ever written worse plays than me.” Pause. “Maybe Henry James.”
CHEEVER AND ROTH had kept occasionally in touch since the Esquire symposium a few years back, and in February 1964 Roth took a train to Ossining to spend a weekend with Cheever’s family. Cheever recorded some impressions in his journal:
Young, supple, gifted, intelligent, he has the young man’s air of regarding most things as if they generated an intolerable heat. I don’t mean fastidiousness, but he holds his head back from his plate of roast beef as if it were a conflagration. He is divorced from a girl I thought delectable. “She won’t even give me back my ice skates.” The conversation hews to a sexual line—cock and balls, Genet, Rechy—but he speaks, I think, with grace, subtlety, wit.
A month or so later, after the National Book Award ceremony, the Cheevers invited Roth to join them for dinner at Sardi’s, where they also brought an attractive young woman who was herself a promising writer. The two young people liked each other and slept together once or twice—then Roth, as was his wont, disappeared. “Mr. Philip Roth / Institute for Unpredictable Behavior / Next to Edward Albie [sic]” the woman subsequently addressed a letter written in the form of a research questionnaire: “1) What happened? 2) Where are we? . . .” She was more bewildered than offended: Roth had seemed sweet-natured and funny, hardly a cad, but he reared away from romantic attachment as if it were a conflagration (as Cheever would have it).
A more sustained effort would follow with Ann Mudge, a socialite from Pittsburgh who’d been featured that January in the fashion section of the Times as one of four Junior Committee members who would model Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry at the Plaza’s annual Diamond Ball; the other women included the late Gary Cooper’s daughter, Maria, and the former Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Mrs. Howard Oxenberg, who was furious that the Times had used Mudge for “the Bitch of the Week picture,” as Mudge put it in 2012 (remarking that Mrs. Oxenberg’s royal title “and a couple of bucks will get you a cup of coffee”). That spring Mudge and Roth became acquainted at a dinner party given by Bennett Cerf and his wife, where Roth had kept the table amused with his well-polished patter about the spouse who wouldn’t give him back his ice skates. In fact he and Mudge had met in passing some five years before, when Roth and Maggie had been among a group of partygoers chez Plimpton who’d adjourned to the Vietnamese Lantern for dinner. Mudge had sat next to Bob Silvers, who told her in a low voice who the others were: “That’s Philip Roth. He’s going to be a very good writer, but he’s with that woman and she’s going to ruin his life. She’s crazy.”
Appearing as “May Aldridge” in The Facts, the elegant Mudge had attracted Roth in part because she, like Maggie, had seemed “intriguingly estranged from the very strata of American society of which they were each such distinctively emblazoned offspring.” Mudge’s father was a Pittsburgh steel executive who drank and didn’t like Jews, while the mother often reminded Ann and her sisters that men were only interested in their looks. Ann, whose debutante party was featured in Town & Country, had a horror of marrying a man like her father and spending the rest of her life at the Pittsburgh Golf Club. After drinking her way out of Bryn Mawr, she ended up at Silver Hill psychiatric hospital in Connecticut. Finally she moved to New York and took occasional work (mainly favors for friends) as an interior decorator; she was also in analysis, which is what she and Roth tended to discuss in the early days of their affair. On and off they’d be together almost five years, during which Roth never once went to Pittsburgh to meet her parents: “He was Jewish and he wrote dirty books,” said Mudge. “I don’t think it bothered him too much.”
The couple had barely started when Roth blew town to spend most of that summer and part of the fall at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs—this on the recommendation of Cheever, to whom he’d explained he was about to be broke, what with the end of his Princeton job and nothing else in sight until his Ford Fellowship began on January 1, 1965. Also he desperately needed to be somewhere beyond Maggie’s reach, so work could again become the center of his life.† Yaddo would prove Roth’s salvation as a writer—a place of placid routine in a sylvan setting, among (mostly) congenial people. After a good night’s sleep in the Trask Mansion (no vicious drunken phone calls or any prospect thereof), followed by a quiet communal breakfast, Roth would grab his lunch pail and walk through the woods to his little studio, Hillside Cottage, whence other colonists would hear typing well after most of them had stopped for the day. Roth would break for lunch (his carrot, celery, and half his sandwich long gone) and join the Armenian musician Richard Hagopian at the swimming pool. Hagopian had recently been divorced by a woman who “shoved a red hot poker up his ass,” said Roth, “and let it cool there a while,” so they had plenty to talk about. Then Roth would work until four or so, take a walk into Saratoga and back, swim laps, play croquet, eat dinner, and return to his lonely but inviolate bed.
There was plenty of swimming, croquet, tennis, and Ping-Pong, but Roth suspected the main sport (for him anyway) was masturbation. “Yaddo is a good place to work, not a bad place to live, and no place at all to carry with you your male part,” he reported to Mendy Wager. “But too much really is made of that thing anyway.” After a mostly celibate month or so, Roth and the others were joined by a new guest, Gladys Brooks, the seventy-seven-year-old widow of critic Van Wyck Brooks. “There is a very strong likelihood that I will try to go down on her at dinner,” Roth wrote Styron. And yet he rather begrudged the odd visit from his own beautiful girlfriend, Mudge, who spent a few weekends at a bed-and-breakfast in town and waited for Roth to phone her. They did all the things one does during summers in Saratoga: the strawberries and cream breakfast at the racetrack; the yearling sales in the big barn at night; a drink at the Spuyten Duyvil bar afterward. By Sunday afternoons, though, Roth would be almost beside himself: “You have to leave now! I have to work!” He compensated by writing her letters at least once a week, and for her birthday he sent a singing telegram.
That first summer at Yaddo, Roth befriended Julius Goldstein, a bachelor painter fifteen years his senior, who taught part-time at Hunter College and lived most of the year in a cramped garret in the Village. Goldstein was a witty fellow who shared Roth’s enthusiasm for women and baseball. He’d had an affair with the poet Delmore Schwartz’s first wife, Gertrude Buckman (whom Roth would later hire as a London tour guide for Bess and Herman), and liked to reminisce about his days on a Manhattan sandlot team, the Yorkville Arrows. He called the southpaw Roth “Lefty,” and after reading one of Roth’s new books, he’d always preface his remarks with “Well, you put another one over on the public, Lefty.” Goldstein was, in fact, a deeply melancholy man whose talk often reverted to the tragedy of his father’s death while he was still in utero, and even his lighter moods were tinged with a kind of quibbling sarcasm. One of Roth’s later girlfriends, who loved Goldstein, dubbed him Uncle Julio Negativo, and made a point of inviting the lonely man to their house as often as the couple could reasonably bear it.
Another important friendship that summer was with the novelist Alison Lurie, who was married to the critic Jonathan Bishop;‡ she and Roth formed an attachment based on mutual literary encouragement. Both had published a single novel and wondered whether they would ever publish another. Roth admired Lurie’s work and told her she could be the “next mean female novelist after Mary McCarthy,” whereas Lurie was so vital to Roth’s progress on his second novel that she’d be numbered among the diverse group of post-Maggie supporters to whom When She Was Good is dedicated.§ Over the next two years Lurie would critique draft after draft of the book Roth had begun soon after finishing Letting Go—that is, around the time he’d committed his imagination to exploring non-Jewish themes and hence was trying to make fiction out of Maggie’s stories about her desperate youth in South Haven, the daughter of the town drunk. “[Philip] has begun a new story about me,” Maggie wrote in her journal on December 28, 1961 (a couple of weeks before Alice Denham’s card arrived and Maggie confessed to the urine fraud). “That is, a woman like me with a terrified boy like [Ronald] married to a monster like [Burt]. He’s very involved and excited about it. And I am excited too to see how it will work out.” The original title was The Goyim, no less, with an epigraph supplied by Helen: “When a Jew says goy, what is he thinking?” The novel about the grim world of Liberty Center was meant to give an answer to that question, or rather to expose certain truths underlying the usual Jewish stereotypes of gentile life, but Roth had given up on the manuscript “after 200 pages and much sweat.”
For a decade or so—beginning with that awful day in January 1962 (“Chicken!”)—Roth would be fixated on finding the right narrative vehicle for the urine episode; during the summer of 1962, while separated from Maggie that first time, he’d tried using it in his play 1957: The Taming of the Id, and also had it in mind for The Goyim—but when he revisited the latter, after letting some marital smoke clear, it read “like the work of a lunatic.” At Yaddo, then, he’d dismally resigned himself to working on his one-act farces as well as a new version of Taming of the Id, but “on a chance” he’d also packed his discarded novel about Liberty Center, now titled Time Away. “Suddenly I saw where it was wrong and where it was right,” he wrote Baker at the end of 1964, “and late in June started in on it again, working almost every day until the middle of October when I had six chapters of a new draft—that is, the whole book—and four of those chapters rewritten into a nearly final draft.” All this in the quiet woods of Saratoga, where he was able to rediscover “good habits of patience” and even something of his old self-confidence.
“Philip, there will always be a bed for you here,” said the seventy-nine-year-old director of Yaddo, Elizabeth Ames, when Roth departed in October. A genteel person averse to suffering fools (with whom she was apt to exaggerate her already well-advanced deafness), Ames regarded the handsome, industrious Roth as an “ideal guest,” and often made a point of inviting him to tea and sitting beside him at the dinner table. “She was one of those strong, independent, highly competent, intelligent, somewhat reserved, childless women on the order of Mildred Martin who I’d always liked,” said Roth, who dedicated The Breast as follows: “To ELIZABETH AMES, executive director of Yaddo from 1924 to 1970 and to THE CORPORATION OF YADDO, Saratoga Springs, New York, the best friends a writer could have.”
PHONE CALLS AT YADDO were fielded by a secretary in the Trask Mansion, and messages were left on a hall table at the end of the day, whereupon they could be returned or ignored as a guest saw fit. Perhaps the last call Roth ever returned to Maggie was sometime in July, during which he mentioned that he needed her to sign a joint tax return that would save him a thousand dollars. “The fucking cocksucking bitch” (as he described her in a subsequent letter to Baker) refused to do so unless Roth agreed to pay the thousand directly to her; rather than comply, Roth decided to “steadily and patiently go broke” between then and January, when he’d return to court and request a reduction of alimony.
Meanwhile he continued to phone Helen in Kenosha every other week, and also sent her a set of monogrammed stationery to encourage her to write. “I want to tank you [sic] so much for the check it will and has gawn to good use,” she obliged him, signing her letters, “I miss you and love you very much.” That summer Roth had driven her to Camp Chateaugay before heading down to Yaddo—a trip Helen remembered as a little nervous-making given her driver’s tendency to lapse into long brooding silences. “You’re only boring when you ask me if you’re boring me,” he assured her, sweetly, and a month later he paid her a visit and was delighted to find her thriving: “Too much to go into here,” he wrote Baker afterward, “except to say that she is (for all her fucked-up grades in school) in love with the most intelligent boy in the camp, and reading Kafka, and very intense Joan Baez, and understands Maggie very very well; it took me years to get where she is now, and she’s thirteen.”
On September 2—a few days before Helen returned to school—Roth drove to the city and took her to a Broadway play (her first), an Actors’ Studio production of Three Sisters, preceded by dinner at Sardi’s. Helen remembered how her mother had lent her a pretty blue dress for the evening, and asked a lot of questions beforehand about where they were going and so forth. At the theater Helen and Roth had just settled into their seats—down front on the aisle (Mendy Wager had gotten them the tickets)—when Roth noticed a genial man with a mustache standing over them: “Mr. Philip Roth?” he inquired, and when Roth nodded the man produced a summons from his inside coat pocket. During intermission Roth left Helen in the lobby with an orange drink and pored over the papers in a toilet stall. “I am really sorry about the upset with the summons,” Fingerhood wrote him a week later. “However, that is evidently our friend’s way of saying that the offer of settlement which was discussed is unacceptable.” Fingerhood made it clear that Maggie’s lawyer could as easily have sent the papers directly to her—“but then,” Roth noted, “of course the drama and the harassment would have gone out of it.”
Roth’s final weeks at Yaddo were blighted by two unanswered phone calls from Maggie (“both angry, I am told”), followed by a letter in which she bitterly informed him that her father had been killed the previous weekend but she couldn’t go to the funeral because Roth was six weeks behind in alimony. “It happens I am one week ahead,” he wrote Lurie, “but the pattern of accusation was so familiar, and the hallucinations, etc. . . . that I haven’t been able to come up from under. My head has been pounding for a week; it feels stuffed; and my neck is like stone.” Work, as ever, was the sovereign anodyne. Another artifact from his recent visit to Maggie’s apartment (after her latest suicide attempt) was a packet of ten-year-old prison letters from Maggie’s father to her mother. Roth appropriated a “collage” of quotes for Whitey’s sorrowful Valentine’s Day letter at the end of When She Was Good—the letter found frozen to the cheek of Lucy Nelson’s corpse. “To put it bluntly,” he wrote of Lucy’s real-life model, “I wish she were dead.”