CHAPTER
Twenty-One
AFTER RETURNING FROM YADDO, ROTH MOVED INTO A pleasant second-floor apartment at 9 East Tenth Street, between Fifth and University. Mudge fixed the place up with secondhand furniture she bought at auctions and flea markets on Roth’s “pathetic budget,” and Roth put off getting a phone as long as possible (he finally allowed himself one with an unlisted number). Determined to avoid the distractions of a busy social life, he was nonetheless within a couple of blocks of his good friends the Schneiders and Julius Goldstein. Roth found a homey, inexpensive Italian restaurant on Houston, Ballato’s, where he ate two or three times a week either alone or with Goldstein and one or two others. As Goldstein grumbled to a mutual friend, he always ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and Roth the most expensive; then, when the check arrived, Roth would say, “Let’s split it.”
In January, Roth reluctantly deferred work on his novel to write plays and watch rehearsals at St. Clement’s Church, where the American Place Theatre was located. That year’s best production by far was Robert Lowell’s The Old Glory, a trilogy of one-act adaptations of two Hawthorne stories as well as (“the stellar piece”) Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” with Frank Langella as Cereno and Roscoe Lee Browne as Babo, the leader of the slave rebellion. Lowell was more than a little manic during rehearsals, and Roth distanced himself when the poet obsessively insisted on showing him snapshots of a young Indian woman he was smitten with.
While Roth moonlighted as a playwright, his friend Bob Silvers made him the New York Review of Books’ “hatchet man in the theater,” as Roth put it—at any rate he wrote two long reviews in nine months that were memorable for their provocative disregard of whatever passed for political correctness in those days. Roth’s pleasant acquaintance with James Baldwin may have suffered as a result of his assessment of Blues for Mister Charlie:
It is soap opera designed to illustrate the superiority of black over whites. . . . They dance better. And they cook better. And their penises are longer, or stiffer. Indeed, so much that comprises the Southern stereotype of the Negro comes back through Negro mouths as testimony to their human superiority, that finally one is about ready to hear that the eating of watermelon increases one’s word power.
The other play under review in Roth’s first piece (“Channel X: Two Plays on the Race Conflict”) was LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman, about a white woman, Lula, who tauntingly flirts with a black man, Clay, on the subway, and finally stabs him in the heart. In the course of suggesting that the ending is gratuitous—not to say illogical, given the characters’ behavior elsewhere in the play—Roth asserted that Clay “is really not Negro enough for us to be told that it is for his being a Negro that he is murdered,” and also said hard things about the play’s “literary pretension” and “false profundity.”
For a white reviewer (a “writer-in-residence at Princeton,” no less, as Roth still identified himself when the piece ran) to suggest that an educated, well-mannered black character conceived by a militant black playwright is “not Negro enough” was rash, even in May 1964, whatever the cogency of Roth’s argument otherwise. “Sir, it is not my fault that you are so feebleminded you refuse to see any Negro as a man, but rather as the narrow product of your own sterile response,” LeRoi Jones’s indignant letter to the New York Review began.
You can not categorize men. If my character is, as you say, “not Negro enough . . .”, then that would mean you have a “definition” of what Negroes are.
The main rot in the minds of “academic” liberals like yourself, is that you take your own distortion of the world to be somehow more profound than the cracker’s. There is little difference except you guys have hipper cover stories . . . A writer-in-residence, indeed!
Roth’s reply was unlikely to lead to cordial feelings between the two Newark writers. He reiterated that Clay (“the Negro character whom I discussed in more than the three words you choose to quote”) was inconsistent as written—modest and polite in the first scene, “violently disposed” in the second. He continued:
Though charity might lead me to suggest that some clumsiness in my review caused you to misconstrue my meaning, the rhetoric and reasoning of your letter are sufficient to overwhelm any great flow of generous feelings in me. But then you would make it especially hard for anyone, I think, to trust very far your powers of analysis, literary or otherwise, when you warn emphatically in the first paragraph, “You can not categorize men,” only to rush on in a second to speak of “the main rot in the minds of ‘academic’ liberals like yourself.”
“I hope to do for the fags this time what I did for the colored last,” Roth quipped about his second review, in February 1965, of Albee’s Tiny Alice. Despite his close friendships with gay men (especially later), Roth could be amazingly tasteless even by the norms of the era; with respect to Tiny Alice, however, he couldn’t abide the “galling sophistication” and “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of what was evidently meant to be an all but impenetrable allegory of gay life. “How long before a play is produced on Broadway in which the homosexual hero is presented as a homosexual,” Roth wrote, “and not disguised as an angst-ridden priest, or an angry Negro”—another dig at LeRoi Jones—“or an aging actress; or worst of all, Everyman?” One reader, Morris Belsnick, subsequently wrote to the editor wondering why Roth had assumed the play’s homosexual meaning was “a dirty little secret which Albee cannot face” since, after all, the very title of the play was a well-known gay expression for “a masculine derriere.” Roth replied: “If Mr. Belsnick is right about the homosexual argot, and if the pun was intentional, then the play is even worse than I thought it was.”
Roth’s main writing project for the first six months of his Ford grant—that is, until he resigned—was a revamping of 1957: The Taming of the Id, now titled The Nice Jewish Boy. The main difference is the Maggie character, renamed Lucy* and so much like her real-life counterpart that Lurie warned Roth not to make her so “unrelievedly evil”: “She must also be pathetic, desperate, etc.—probably telling herself that the ends justify the means, and that marrying her will be good for Mendy and even save him, from whatever she thinks he needs saving from.” This, of course, could serve as an astute summation of Maggie’s own rationale, though it only went so far to mitigate Roth’s drastically prejudiced view of things at the time. In one of his later unpublished novels about Maggie and the urine fraud (or rather a novel about trying to write a novel about Maggie, etc.), Zuckerman remembers a failed, Nice Jewish Boy–like play featuring his wife “Roberta”: “the wicked heroine (wearing Roberta’s fierce helmet of blond hair) viciously tricks the unsuspecting hero (wearing my soulful eyes) into their marriage.” That was it in a nutshell, and, to be sure, in this second version of the play, Mendy is more guileless and, yes, soulful. “Your love touches me, but I can’t return it, that’s all,” he breaks it to Lucy, quoting Masha’s words to Medvedenko in The Seagull. Lucy, however, is not one to be mollified by gentle rhetoric, and vows to bear his “illegitimate child” and show the world how “rotten and wicked” he is. In art as in life, the young man collapses, asking only that Lucy tell him he’s “good” as the curtain falls: “Oh you are,” she says, embracing his head. “You are. You’re very very very very good.”
The Nice Jewish Boy was sound enough to rate a reading at the American Place Theatre on June 23, 1965; Roth wanted to hear it performed in front of an invited audience, so he’d have a better sense of how to proceed toward a final draft. The director was Gene Saks, and the two lead parts were read by promising off-Broadway actors, Dustin Hoffman and Melinda Dillon. But it was no good. Roth hectored Hoffman to be more “forceful”—his usual desideratum for dramatic portrayals of characters based on himself—but neither man could make the play or its eponymous hero very original or interesting. Roth withdrew it after the reading, and spent a year or so vaguely considering another rewrite before deciding that he disliked the whole collaborative aspect of theater; meanwhile the Ford grant wasn’t enough to live on, so he resigned after six months and took a teaching job for the fall.
MAGGIE HAD WAITED until after the original separation and alimony decree, in April 1964, to accept a full-time job as a production editor in the College Department at Harper & Row, where she earned $100 a week before taxes. Roth, in turn, had stayed the course toward going broke except for his Ford grant and dwindling royalties from Letting Go, and a referee was slated to consider his request for an alimony reduction on June 11, 1965. Maggie had girded herself by firing two lawyers and hiring a third on the basis of his proven ferocity. “I seem to have made an enemy,” Roth observed, only a little gratified by the referee’s reduction of $40 a week. Fingerhood had given him reason to hope for more, what with Maggie’s earnings at Harper; even with reduced alimony, her annual income was now roughly $1,500 more than his, and meanwhile he was forced to borrow $4,000 (at 5¼ percent interest) from Joe Fox, a thousand of which went to pay back a loan to Mel Tumin.
For two years Tumin had been urging Roth to “make a clean, formal break,” not only with Maggie but with her entire ménage—even or especially his beloved stepdaughter, Helen, from whom Roth had begun to distance himself after the Three Sisters fiasco. “I haven’t had a letter from you in quiet [sic] a while,” she wrote him early that spring.
What has happened? Do you dislike me now for being Mrs. Philip Roths [sic] daughter? I am her daughter, but I’m myself also. Philip I love you for what you are and for what you did. If you hadn’t it would have been the Fall of My Empire, you know that as well as I do. I know it has been hell for you and maybe still. But we have both wonderful and terrible memories. I have made the wonderful standout from the others and I hope you have too.
Roth’s heart was certainly wrung, but he also knew it was a matter of time before Maggie made false claims of sexual impropriety—all the more plausible as the girl continued to bloom. Walking in the park with her mother that previous summer, Helen had innocently related a recent dream in which she married Philip and proved a more compatible wife than Maggie had.
A few days before leaving Kenosha, in June 1965, she wrote asking Roth to see her that summer (“Philip please don’t avoid me”), and he knew he couldn’t wait any longer. “I’m not going to be able to see you while you are in New York,” he replied.
This is difficult to write, and will be difficult for you to read, I know; but it is necessary. You are a marvelous girl and I want you to have a future full of personal accomplishment and happiness and love. I will always value the feeling we have had for one another. I have learned a lot about courage and sweetness from watching you grow up. You have both qualities in abundance. There are few people I admire as much as I admire you.
But the time has come in my own life to give up the last connections to what has been for me a very trying experience. I am not going to explain anymore than that. If you are unable to understand why I think this is necessary, maybe in the years to come the situation will be clearer to you, and more easily understood. . . .
With love, Philip
Helen was devastated, and couldn’t resist riding her bicycle to the Village and waiting for Roth on his stoop. When he came out, he sat down and sadly reiterated that he simply couldn’t see her anymore and hoped she would understand someday. “I was bereft,” she said, sobbing to remember it almost fifty years later.
THAT FALL Roth began his long, happy, sporadic association with the University of Pennsylvania. From the beginning he loved the weekly ritual of taking a morning train out of Penn Station; he’d find a seat in the old-fashioned dining car and eat a good breakfast off proper crockery. He found his students bright and attractive, and made a number of lasting friendships among his colleagues—including the man who recruited him, Jerre Mangione, whom he’d first met at Yaddo and who would come to Roth’s apartment on May 27, 1966, to interview him for WNET, the New York public television station. It had been six years since Roth’s fractious encounter with Mike Wallace, and another twenty-seven would pass before he consented to appear on TV again. In 1966, however, the show went without a hitch, except for an item in that day’s mail and the boiling heat; while elaborate cables were laid around the apartment, Roth and Mangione tried cooling off by drinking beer and are seen suppressing belches throughout the interview. The thirty-three-year-old Roth’s hair is thinning around the temples but still covers most of his crown, and he seems at ease on camera, chatting lucidly with elegant little hand gestures. Thanks to Ann Mudge, the apartment is nicely appointed, with a trim little couch under an open window, a handsome old mirror over the fireplace, and a floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcase to the left of it; opposite Roth and his tidily cluttered desk is a wing chair containing his staring, bespectacled interviewer.
Around that time Maggie was occasionally in the neighborhood to attend writing classes at the New School; Roth figured she hoped to publish a book exposing him to the world as a scoundrel, and one day he spotted her approaching him on the sidewalk and gave her such a menacing glare that she almost stumbled into the gutter to avoid him. Her attitude toward his current novel was hard to pin down. Shortly after Roth had left her in the spring of 1963, she wrote Fox that she’d read a draft of “the Ann Barnes”—as the Maggie-like heroine was then called—“Time Away ms.” and was “very moved by much of it”; once the book was published, however, she wrote a more cryptic response to their wedding witnesses, the Gibberds. “We had a curious letter from Maggie not long ago,” Vernon wrote Roth, “in which she assumed an air of detached indifference to your recent work, and followed a vitriolic attack on it with a remark that one didn’t feel bitter about it one bit, because it wasn’t worth it.” That day in 1966, anyway, while the WNET production crew was setting up in Roth’s apartment, he thought to check his mail and found a manila envelope stuffed full of pages. Roth stood reading them in the foyer. It was a story by Maggie about a kinky fellow named Ross Phillips who derives sexual gratification from enemas, as administered by his obedient wife, rather the way Maggie had obliged Roth the night before his polyp operation in 1959. “Wouldn’t it be nice if she wrote a best-seller exposing me and made so much money she got fucked out of the alimony?” Roth wrote Fingerhood a few days later, signing himself “The Dreamer.”
His favorite bedtime reading was The Complete Guide to Divorce, by Samuel G. Kling, from which he learned that a separation lasting anywhere from eighteen months to three years—“without cohabitation and without reasonable expectation of reconciliation”—was grounds for divorce in eleven states, including Arkansas, where a former Iowa student of his, Bill Harrison (Rollerball Murder), was on the faculty at the state university. Thus he’d phoned Harrison in early 1965, and was offered a job in Fayetteville beginning in 1966.
Perhaps with this long-term absence somewhat in mind, he’d decided to break up with Mudge, whose meek gentility had begun to bore him a little. That meant going back on the party circuit (“I go to parties only when I am looking for a new girl”), a program that helped earn him mention among The New York Times Magazine’s “In Crowd” of 1965: “100 of America’s wealthiest, most famous, and most creative people,” including William Paley, Greta Garbo, and Truman Capote (Roth himself was ranked 79, between Richard Rodgers and Mrs. Louise Liberman Savitt; the more sociable Styron was a lowly 96). “As for being ‘in,’ ” Roth wrote his parents, “if I could find the office where you hand in your resignation, I would. I think there must have been some mistake anyway, since I can’t watusi.” There was no mistake, and probably his being the youngest-ever winner of the National Book Award had less to do with it than his frequent appearances, that spring, at Bennett Cerf’s apartment, where he hobnobbed with the likes of Sinatra, Claudette Colbert, and—perhaps most thrilling of all—Martin Gabel, the man who’d narrated Norman Corwin’s On a Note of Triumph twenty years before.
It’s also likely the Times had caught wind of Roth’s fleeting involvement with Jackie Kennedy, arguably the most famous woman in the world at the time, a mere fifteen months after her husband’s assassination. “Every morning a stock-market report on reputations comes out in New York,” Norman Podhoretz would soon write in Making It. “It is invisible, but those who have eyes to see can read it. Did so-and-so have dinner at Jacqueline Kennedy’s apartment last night? Up five points. . . . Did so-and-so’s book get nominated for the National Book Award? Up two and five-eighths.” Roth was one of the few people on the planet who came close to meeting these two diverse criteria, and it was chez Podhoretz where the more enviable of the two had germinated. That night Roth found himself seated on one side of Mrs. Kennedy, while the guest of honor, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, was on the other; to Roth she vouchsafed her awe that Edmund Wilson was also in the room. “Mrs. Kennedy was beautiful, alert, alive, and very sad,” an unwontedly solemn Roth reported to Lurie. “I don’t think she knows what to do with herself. I was very taken with her, to be frank.”
And vice versa. Perhaps a week later, Joe Fox was contacted by Kitty Carlisle Hart’s social secretary, who charged him with asking Roth whether he’d be willing to serve as Mrs. Kennedy’s dinner partner a few nights hence. The only immediate impediment, for Roth, was his wardrobe: he owned a total of two suits (a blue three-piece and the stalwart glen plaid) and three pairs of shoes, none of them black; the day of the party, then, he bought black shoes at Brooks Brothers and walked all over town in them (lest he cross his legs and reveal a pristinely unscuffed sole and hence the fact that he’d bought them expressly for the occasion). The party was all right: the theater critic Walter Kerr was there with his wife, Jean (author of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies), while their hostess was partnered with the actor Tom Poston (“a poor man’s Jack Lemmon”). On the sidewalk afterward, Roth offered to hail a cab for Mrs. Kennedy, but she wanted to walk a bit; when Roth worried about her heels, she raised a hand and her black limousine materialized beside them. “Do you want to come upstairs?” she asked outside her apartment building on Fifth Avenue. “Oh, of course you do.” She assured him the children were sleeping (You mean the little boy who salutes like this, Roth thought, and the little girl who calls her pony Macaroni?), and they sat chatting for an hour or so. There was one lingering kiss, and a little later they said good night—though not before she gave Roth a card with her private phone number and asked him to call her.
“I wasn’t up to it,” he said, many years later. What business did he have dating the widow Kennedy, with only two suits and four pairs of shoes? The last time they met was 1983, at a New York Public Library gala, where he was named a Literary Lion. Then, in March 1994, he heard she was sick with cancer and gave her a call; afterward he sent her (a famous Francophile after all) the French edition of Deception: “Thank you for Tromperie,” she wrote. “I can’t wait.” Two months later she died.
A FEW DAYS AFTER resigning his Ford Fellowship at the end of June 1965, Roth took a train to East Hampton to spend a weekend with Joe Fox, and also on that train was his estranged girlfriend, Ann Mudge. They sat together in the mostly empty car and began to flirt; at one point she dropped something on the floor between them, and when Roth ducked to retrieve it, he caught a glimpse of her fragrant leg, neatly crossed and jiggling slightly: “That was it.”
They were a steady couple after that, as Roth became more and more partial to a proper domestic routine. Mudge had a trust fund and lived in a comfortable Sutton Place apartment; almost every evening Roth would go there after finishing work (often walking down from his six o’clock appointment with Kleinschmidt on East Sixty-eighth), and Mudge would have dinner waiting, served with a half bottle of wine, since she herself drank nothing stronger than Ovaltine because of her past problems with alcohol. Perhaps the best part, for Roth, was the way she would leave around six thirty in the morning to see her own analyst, then return an hour later and crawl back in bed with him. His friend Julius Goldstein would later remark that Roth had an “old-fashioned” need for a woman to take care of him, and Roth would not have disagreed: he found a mate’s loving-kindness “very stabilizing”—reminiscent of coming home to his mother’s tomato soup or slice of cake covered with wax paper, an essential part of his favorite Flaubert dictum, “Be orderly and regular in your life like a bourgeois . . .”
Roth had little patience for Mudge’s rich friends, much less the way they wangled free decorating jobs out of her. She was highly intelligent; why didn’t she do something worthwhile, he wondered, like finish her college degree? When he pressed her about it, she burst into tears and said the whole idea frightened her. What if she failed, or, worse (“in my family circle women who were accomplished were considered very strange ducks indeed”), what if she succeeded? But Roth insisted, and together they pored over the NYU catalogue and picked out courses for her. Over the next couple of years she made the dean’s list and got her degree, then went on to law school. “None of that would have happened if it hadn’t been for Philip,” she said, and it worked both ways. After a few months with Mudge he felt “confident and strong again,” and decided to cancel his plans for expediting a divorce in Arkansas.
The summer of their reunion, 1965, was also the summer he discovered Martha’s Vineyard, where he’d gone in late August to visit the Brusteins. Roth was “overwhelmed”: within walking distance of their house near Lambert’s Cove was a lovely freshwater swimming hole, Seth’s Pond, as well as a colony of writers including Styron, Lillian Hellman, Philip Rahv, and many others Roth would meet for the first time there. That summer, too, Bellow was staying on the island with his third wife, Susan Glassman, who hadn’t changed much in the seven years since she and Roth had briefly dated in Chicago. “Susan looks handsome but complains a bit,” Lurie had written him a few weeks before his arrival. “I was there when [Bellow] brought in the mail, a great pile of it. ‘Anything for me!’ Susan said. ‘Not today, honey.’ ” The previous year Bellow had published Herzog, which Roth would come to consider, along with Augie March, “the most splendid of the splendid”; his first response, however (as with Augie), was quite a bit more ambivalent. “Roth is sitting by the side of the pool smelling in every side of Herzog,” Kazin noted in his diary on July 7, 1965, when both were at Yaddo. A few days later Roth delivered his verdict to Lurie: “There is something morally obtuse about the book. And really too much pleading for the soul. Somewhere back of it all is that Jewish family hysteria about love.” “You might not like me to say this,” Lurie replied from the Vineyard, “but [Bellow] is rather like you, he made remarks you might have made.” Jules Feiffer got rather the same impression a month later, when he and Roth came across Bellow sitting in his car outside a bakery in Vineyard Haven. Roth stood at the car window exchanging wisecracks with the driver, who pulled forward ever so slowly until his tires almost rolled over his younger colleague’s toes. “Watch it!” Roth laughed, staggering back. “No,” said Bellow, “you watch it.”
The following summer Roth and Mudge rented a little house in the woods near the Brusteins, with a screened porch in back looking out on the bay. Roth had finished When She Was Good at the end of June (“Philip Roth SURPRISES US with completed ms of novel,” Cerf excitedly wrote in his diary) and was looking forward to a rare summer of leisure. Mudge stayed in the city until August to keep up with her analysis, flying to the island on weekends; one day the two stopped for lunch in Edgartown on the way back from the airport, and an anti-Semitic lady loudly informed Roth that the island used to be Irish and English. “What century was that, you miserable cunt,” he replied.
Other than that the Vineyard was “perfect,” as Roth reported to Lurie. In the afternoon he and Mudge would gather with friends at Lambert’s Cove Beach, or, if they wanted more privacy, they’d go a few miles down the coast to Menemsha, where they’d screw in the dunes and harvest mussels, which Mudge would cook with wine. They also saw a fair amount of the Kennedys: the Styrons were old friends, and it so happened Mudge and Teddy had been in school together at Graham-Eckes in Palm Beach (“for rich people who didn’t want their social lives and travels interrupted by the nuisance of children,” Mudge explained). One day Jackie invited Roth and Mudge, the Styrons, and Lillian Hellman onto her yacht for a picnic lunch on the beach; the only hard feelings she betrayed were in her somewhat austere treatment of Roth’s consort. “Where are you from?” she inquired as Mudge climbed aboard; “Pittsburgh,” said Mudge, whereupon their hostess looked away and that was that.
The couple also attended a festive dinner party hosted by Dick Goodwin, a former Kennedy speechwriter, whose guests included the Styrons and the junior senator from New York, Robert Kennedy. The last was in particularly good fettle, puffing a cigar and chatting with Mudge. “Is Mr. Roth going to marry you, or what?” he said, loud enough for the others to hear. “That remains to be seen,” said Mudge. Kennedy turned to Roth and asked what his intentions were. “It depends, Senator, if I can ever get a divorce in your state from the wife I’m already married to.” Kennedy puffed his cigar and turned to a legislative aide. “See what we can do for Mr. Roth,” he said, “so he can marry Miss Mudge as soon as possible.”
THE GREAT DRAWBACK of living on East Tenth was noise: Greenwich Village blared outside Roth’s window, especially on weekends, and an upstairs neighbor was forever blasting his hi-fi. By the fall of 1966 Roth had had enough, and he rented a top-floor apartment in the north building of Kips Bay Plaza, the new 1,118-unit complex designed by I. M. Pei and S. J. Kessler between East Thirtieth and Thirty-third Streets. From Roth’s window he could see all the way from the gold-domed New York Life building to the Brooklyn Bridge; unfortunately there was a slight incline on Second Avenue, twenty-one floors below, and the clamorous grinding of gears went on at all hours. On the other hand the sixties were in full swing at Kips Bay, where Roth would proposition his female neighbors in the lobby and elevators (“easy as pie”).
Toward the close of that auspicious year, on November 28, Roth and Mudge attended Capote’s legendary Black and White Ball at the Plaza. He and Capote shared an editor, Fox, and of course they’d met at Cerf’s. “We don’t want to go to this thing, do we?” said Roth when he received an invitation. Their pre-ball dinner was at the Dakota apartment of Amanda and Carter Burden, where Roth sat next to the twenty-year-old Candice Bergen, who’d recently departed Penn because of poor grades. At the Plaza, according to the Times, Roth “whirled” Mudge and Mrs. Joseph Fox and Mrs. Norman Mailer around the dance floor, as well as (he recalled) a masked stranger who proved to be President Johnson’s daughter Lynda Bird. While whirling Beverly Mailer, the latter’s husband lumbered in their wake muttering, cheerfully enough, “We’ve got to watch out for these shiksas, Roth. Never trust a gentile girl.” “Now he tells me,” Roth wrote Lurie the next day. “Ann and Bob Silvers and myself were sitting in a box above the dance floor when I suddenly had this grotesquely Nabokovian vision of my former mate charging across the ballroom floor with a revolver and slaying me in my evening clothes at the EVENT of the century, and in my box. It sounds like a good last scene for a comic novel.”