CHAPTER
Twenty-Four
PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY 1969, would become the best-selling novel in the illustrious history of Random House; by the year’s end it had been number 1 for a total of seventeen weeks and sold almost 420,000 copies in hardcover, while the Bantam edition went on to sell 3.5 million copies in the first five years. In Australia, the novel was banned and its merits raucously debated for almost two years, at the end of which literary censorship was effectively abolished in the country. As for the author: shortly after his wife was cremated, and before the publication of his most notorious novel, he said he might write a book that would “stand Kafka on his head. . . . Instead of having a guy who is more and more pursued and trapped and finally destroyed by his tormentors, I want to start with a guy tormented and then the opposite happens. They come to the jail and they open the door and they say to you, ‘A terrible mistake has been made.’ And they give you your suit back, with your glasses and your wallet and your address book, and they apologize to you.”
On May 29, 1968, Joe Fox had excitedly informed his colleagues that Roth was a week away from delivering his new novel, for which Random House would be expected to pony up an advance that was “probably astronomical and worth every penny of it.” By then the four early excerpts had made Roth a celebrity: Time had already called his latest work “the most brilliant piece of radical humor in years,” and two months later The New York Times predicted Portnoy would “be one of the most talked about books of the winter.” When Roth returned from Yaddo at the end of May, Donadio phoned Cerf and briskly negotiated an advance of $250,000, followed that summer by another $250,000 for movie rights, $350,000 from Bantam for paperback rights (Roth got half), and $60,000 from the Literary Guild. Also a sizable portion of Roth’s advance for When She Was Good was still unpaid, along with various foreign monies, so that Roth predicted his total income for 1968 would come to roughly $827,000.* And it was all his!
Roth prepared for wealth and fame by looking for a new car, a new apartment, and (as he mentioned to New York magazine) a new editor at Random House. Almost two years earlier—three days after Roth had composed his ten-point grievance letter against his publisher, dated July 28, 1967—Donadio had sat down with Fox and Cerf to talk things over. “I think it was fruitful and cleared the air,” Fox wrote Roth afterward, admitting he’d been “hurt” at first, but had since seen the justice of Roth’s complaints and was “heartily sorry”: “For your possible interest, amusement and/or derision,” Fox concluded, “what I have learned from all this has pushed me over the brink into going into therapy. If I am so insensitive to the anguishes of someone I have thought of as a close friend, as well as a treasured author to whose work and aspirations I feel very close, I am obviously in big trouble.” In fact Fox got in touch with none other than Kleinschmidt, lest Roth doubt the sincerity of his remorse, which was all the more extraordinary given Fox’s well-known reluctance to become attached to people he worked with. His friend and colleague Jason Epstein—who would replace him as Roth’s editor—remembered a “bright line [of privacy] you didn’t want to cross” vis-à-vis Fox, who told another of his authors, Edward Hoagland, that he wasn’t available to him as a friend (“I have my personal life and you are not a part of it”).
The first thing Roth did with his Portnoy windfall was write a check to Fox for the $8,000 (plus interest) he’d borrowed over the years; then he had his agent break the news that Epstein would be Roth’s editor going forward. “I’m sorry, for both our sakes, that you did not feel able to tell me yourself,” Fox wrote him, austerely, doubtless bearing in mind all the weekends Roth had been a guest at Fox’s houses in Bedford and East Hampton—all the hilarious touch football games with Plimpton, Nelson Aldrich, and so on. “I asked Candida to sever a professional relationship for me,” Roth replied. “I was ‘able’ to do it myself, but frankly I didn’t want to. I am as fond of [you] as I’ve ever been, though if your engine doesn’t throb any longer at the sound of my name, I can understand.” Roth confessed he’d been unpleasantly reminded of the problems they’d had over When She Was Good when Fox had recently warned him—“in Bedford and again in your office”—not to demand so much money for Portnoy (“I didn’t like it when rich guys were offended that I asked for a lot of money,” said Roth in 2012). “You have been a good and devoted friend,” Roth continued, “—another reason (not that I expect you’ll think it a good one) why I asked my agent to do the dirty work.” Fox was decidedly unpersuaded. After a gruesome encounter at a party that August of 1968, he wrote a final note to Roth clarifying his position:
Despite our differences in the past, I considered you one of my closest friends, and if you had come in to see me Monday morning and said—sheepishly, defensively, angrily, coolly, or whatever—that for various reasons, rational or not, you wanted to change editors, we could have survived the awkwardness and remained friends. But you couldn’t bring yourself to do that, and this indicates to me, rightly or wrongly, that our relationship meant far less to you than it did to me.
THE NEXT BIG CHECK Roth wrote, after paying off Fox, was for two first-class tickets on the luxury liner France. Somewhat impulsively he’d decided to take Mudge to England for a couple of months, staying a few days in a nice hotel before renting a car and driving “the length and breadth of the British Isles”; then, during August, he planned to rent a posh flat back in London where he could work on Portnoy galleys. Mudge told him he’d need a proper tuxedo for dinners aboard the France and helped him pick one out at Barney’s. “I could take you back to Pittsburgh in that,” she said, admiring the result. “Sure,” said Roth, “we’d wow ’em at the country club. Especially after my little book comes out.” She never mentioned Pittsburgh again.
The crossing was “a delight, the food perfect,” Roth wrote friends; he’d been especially pleased by a photograph in the ship’s magazine of Mudge and him, splendid in their evening attire, identified as “Mr. and Mrs. Philip Roth.” In fact, the prospect of connubial respectability seemed to grow more distant by the day. Shortly after arriving in London, Roth was interviewed by an attractive young journalist, who politely declined his invitation to pass the afternoon in a hotel room. Indeed, the whole trip began to pall. Roth was bothered by noisy Piccadilly traffic outside their window at the Ritz, so they moved to the Connaught; then, the night before they were to depart for the long road trip to Edinburgh, Roth became sick at Jonathan and Rachel Miller’s house. Jonathan had directed The Old Glory at the American Place Theatre, and also, as luck would have it, had studied medicine before starting the comedy troupe Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett (also a guest that night). Roth had been holding forth after dinner about his near death experience the year before, then admitted he was feeling pretty queasy even as he spoke. Miller had him lie down on the butcher-block table where they’d just eaten, and after a brief examination decided to get him to University College Hospital, where he was diagnosed with adhesions beneath his appendectomy scar.
Roth was ordered to rest, eat lightly, and stay close to London; instead of Scotland, then, they traveled fifty miles to Buckinghamshire, where the Gibberds lived in a small converted pub on the Grand Union Canal (the setting for Roth’s author photo on the Portnoy jacket). At the Gibberds’, Roth reported, they slept “in a pissy-smelling (cat piss) attic room” before returning to London and renting a “barny underfurnished flat” on Glebe Place, just off the King’s Road. At loose ends, Roth decided he might as well spend some money, and so embarked on a series of fittings at Kilgour, French & Stanbury on Savile Row, where he ended up buying four suits. He was also fitted for trendier duds at celebrity tailor Dougie Hayward’s shop in Mayfair; the bell-bottom trousers were tight in the crotch, and a friend remarked that they looked “like an ad for the Mattachine Society.” It hardly mattered, since Roth would hang all five suits in his closet at home and rarely look at them again.
“I’ve been a perfect crab,” Roth noted, “—I keep thinking, How can this be happening to me, with all my money!” They drove through picturesque hamlets and toured old Anglo-Saxon churches, but the only thing that really engaged him was English TV—namely, the spectacle of Mayor Daley’s police bludgeoning yippies on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention: “[I] wondered what the hell I was doing trying vainly to have a good time abroad while the turbulence of the American sixties, which had enlivened both my fiction and my life, looked finally to be boiling over.” By August he’d had enough, booking passage on the Queen Elizabeth and arriving in New York the morning after Labor Day. “Delighted to be back in this madhouse,” he wrote a friend.
MUDGE WOULD PROVE another casualty of his post-Maggie restlessness. In recent years Roth had found equilibrium in the quiet pleasure of Mudge’s company; otherwise he kept more and more to himself—working all day and reading at night. Now, however, rich and free and soon to be world-famous, he had to face facts: he adored Mudge but was sexually bored with her; as a rule he thought there was a “two-year limit” to sexual interest, and marriage was deadly in any case. Also, he never again wanted to give the state power to punish his private behavior, which would inevitably include adultery if he were to marry again. “You’re never coming back, lamb chop,” Mudge said sadly, when he proposed a six-month separation after their return from England, and of course she was right.
Mudge remained devastated by her breakup with Roth. A mutual friend, Barbara Jakobson, mentioned to him how she and Mudge had packed up his things in her apartment, and both women had wept when Mudge remembered how much he’d loved an old pair of suede slippers. “Pure Chekhov,” Roth quipped at the time, though in later years—after many women and another marriage that went disastrously awry—he would sometimes wish he’d married Mudge after all: he would have been unfaithful, and the marriage would have ended, but he might have come out of it (à la the hero of Everyman after marriage to the Mudgelike Phoebe) with a loving daughter who’d care for him in his dotage.
During the fall of 1968, anyway, he wasn’t single for long. The year before, while gathering in Central Park for the antiwar march along Fifth Avenue, he’d bumped into his old army buddy Marty Garbus, now a leading civil rights lawyer in New York. Back in touch, Garbus had recently invited him and Mudge to a small dinner party on November 8; the two were already broken up but decided to attend. Among the six guests was a beautiful twenty-three-year-old doctoral candidate at the Union Theological Seminary, Barbara Sproul, who’d murmured of Roth and his elegant companion, “What a lovely couple”—then was startled when Roth phoned the next day asking for a date.
But not terribly startled. At the time she herself was seeing two men named Peter: a young publisher, Peter Mayer (her date chez Garbus), who had a cabin near hers at the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York, and a young newscaster from Canada, Peter Jennings, whom she’d met at the Byrdcliffe swimming pool. Otherwise she lived alone with her cat in a family apartment on East Thirty-fifth, between Park and Lexington, where her father had killed himself two years before. Her demeanor in the face of tragedy (there were others) was stoically matter-of-fact, which Roth admired: “She’d been through a lot of shit and she was solid,” he said. At a tender age she maintained two homes, shuttling between them in a little MG, and worked hard on her studies while doing what she liked with her free time. That year she spent Christmas with Jennings while seeing more and more of Roth, whom she took to Woodstock one snowy weekend and showed around town and the mountains beyond. Not a great reader of fiction, Sproul asked for recommendations and Roth gave her several marked-up books from his own library. “Why did you underline that?” she asked, pointing to a particular passage, and he quietly replied “Because it’s beautiful.” Later explaining Roth’s appeal to her twenty-three-year-old self, Sproul wrote, “In his writing, his humor, his interests, his commitment to the work and the subjects it considers, he was/is serious—morally serious. And that appealed to me enormously.”
“The fucking was extraordinary,” said Roth, whom Sproul remembered as a little abashed by their intricate sex play (“Kink would scare him”), citing a time he’d plied a vibrator and then “mous[ed] around” the next day, as if expecting a Maggie-like tirade about his wickedness. “Well, that was fun,” said Sproul, proposing they get a couple of vibrators for friends and then openly asking for same at the drugstore. Others were struck by Sproul’s assertiveness, at least relative to Mudge, though Kleinschmidt (for one) wasn’t having any: “A mature woman wouldn’t take your shit,” he commented on Roth’s new romance.
ROTH’S LEASE AT Kips Bay expired that winter, and he found more sumptuous quarters at 18 East Eighty-first Street, a stone’s throw from Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum and incidentally across the street from Campbell’s funeral home, where he’d said goodbye to Maggie. Roth rented one of two parlor-floor apartments in the four-story building. His spacious living room was connected via a book-lined corridor to his study, also lined with bookcases and big windows giving a view of the backyard and its single plane tree. The small, nondescript bedroom was tucked away in the rear. Roth finished moving in at the end of January 1969 and summed up the month of February as “Awful . . . New apartment unfurnished. No Ann.” From his tall front windows he could see caskets going in and out of Campbell’s, and that June he would observe thousands of heartbroken fans lining up to see Judy Garland, lying in state.
Desperate to cheer things up, Roth hired a professional decorator who arranged his living room, said Lurie, in the style of a “formal women’s club” with what appeared to be a “frieze of penises around the top of the walls”; Roth also splurged on a couple of gorgeous Persian rugs, and enlisted his discerning friend Nina Schneider to help pick out a handsome leather sofa and wing chair for the study, as well as a big sturdy worktable and bamboo ladder for his bookshelves. The little beige-walled bedroom remained almost grimly bare, perhaps because of Roth’s penitence for all the “fashionable decorating shit,” as he wrote Kleinschmidt: “WHY DIDN’T YOU STOP ME? As our poor pal Portnoy might put it.”
Portnoy’s stridency was much on his mind, given the clamor arising from his hero’s increasing notoriety. Jason Epstein had predicted the year before that Portnoy would be “the biggest book in history”—a statement that seemed less hyperbolic as time went by. On January 11, the Times declared Roth’s novel “a certain best-seller six weeks before publication,” and gave a concrete reason why, to wit, “the prevalence of masturbation.”
Amid the headiness of autumn Roth had agreed to any number of interviews for what was shaping up as “a new record for publicity overkill”—as his friend Albert Goldman would presently write in Life—but as the air chilled Roth felt a growing dread, and fled to Yaddo for the month of December. He returned in time for Howard Junker’s profile in the January 13 New York magazine, which got the ball rolling in earnest toward persuading the public that Roth and Portnoy were one and the same: “Roth kicked the nice Jewish boy bit,” Junker wrote, “the stance of the Jamesian moral intelligence, and unleashed his comic, foulmouthed, sex-obsessed demon. His true self.” Very like Alex Portnoy, Junker observed, Roth “notices every girl that passes on the street,” and moreover is given to “exultant self-revelation” ever since he was “freed” by psychoanalysis and “the death of his estranged wife last May.” “He got so much wrong,” Roth wrote Susan Sontag (to whom he’d allegedly referred as Suzy Q. Sontag in Junker’s presence), “and made so much up (and probably more out of ineptness than malice) that I can’t hope to begin to straighten things out in this letter, or anywhere.”
As for Goldman’s feature in Life (“ ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ by Philip Roth Looms as a Wild Blue Shocker and the American Novel of the Sixties”), it began, at least, as a lark: the photographer Bob Peterson had accompanied the friends as they explored Roth’s old haunts in Newark and spent a day at Yaddo. The piece that followed, however, went a little far in characterizing the novel as the cultural equivalent of the Second Coming: “A savior and scapegoat of the ’60s, Portnoy is destined at the Christological age of 33 to take upon himself all the sins of sexually obsessed modern man and expiate them in a tragicomic crucifixion.” Various Jewish luminaries—Bellow, Joseph Heller, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, the Marx Brothers, et al.—were invoked as relatively minor forerunners to Roth, who “has explored the Jewish family myth more profoundly than any of his predecessors, shining his light into all corners and realizing its ultimate potentiality is an archetype of contemporary life.”
Random House, meanwhile—the firm that had brought Ulysses to American readers in 1934—was careful to have Portnoy vetted for obscene and defamatory content by Arthur F. Abelman of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, who concluded that the novel, as a whole, “contains elements of redeeming social value, such as humor,” but advised that a reference to Mayor Lindsay’s genitals on pages 272–73 might be construed as “an invasion of privacy. . . . Furthermore, since he controls the police in this City, such reference is an unwise provocation.” Given, too, that Alex Portnoy is employed in the Lindsay administration, Abelman thought it a good idea to find out whether some actual person held a similar job and otherwise resembled Roth’s hero; Irving Goldhaber, assistant director of the Commission of Human Relations, worried that some such confusion might indeed ensue, so Portnoy’s title was changed to “Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity.”
Random House celebrated publication day, February 21, with a dinner at the swanky Raffles club; on the menu were “Mousse de Homard à la Sophie, Fine Champagne (Château Weequahic 1949), Monkey soupe à la Tortue aux Xérès, and Dessert à votre choix (Cordon Klienschmidt [sic]).” But the fun had already begun to curdle for Roth, and the reviewers were even more exasperating than usual, what with their persistent tendency to regard his novel as a confession: “Roth’s past life resembles Alex Portnoy’s,” said Time, giving examples, and even the sympathetic Brendan Gill, in The New Yorker, described Portnoy as Roth’s “hero and counterpart.” Gill was mostly enthusiastic, though, whereas the novel excited a degree of generational testiness in Alfred Kazin: “I admire it, but love it I don’t,” he wrote Jason Epstein. “The Jewish family torture, even for those who have gone through the mill, has in the past not been so purely psychological, has certainly in the past gone along with a certain moral and even spiritual insight. But Roth is essentially a savage writer: no nuances, and above all, no love.” Kazin glossed over the worst of this verdict in his critique for The New York Review of Books, conceding Roth’s gifts as a “mimic and fantasist” but remarking that “he can write of Jews only as hysterics” and also taking him to task for what Irving Howe would later characterize as “thin personal culture”—as Kazin put it, “he writes without the aid of general ideas (Herzog suffered twice as much as Portnoy does, but Herzog also lived in history; Portnoy lives only through his mother).” Over the years Kazin would sometimes try explaining as much to Roth, whose idea of “Jewish identity,” said Kazin, was a callow secularization of a subject that “began in the desert, not in Newark.” “You don’t understand,” he’d say, poking the younger man in the chest. “You don’t even understand when I tell you you don’t understand.”
Less exacting or touchy critics tended to applaud the novel as not only refreshing in its gleeful obscenity, but also (contra Kazin) “painfully and playfully moving,” as Roth’s old Amagansett pal Josh Greenfeld wrote in his front-page rave for the Times Book Review, “a work that is certainly catholic in appeal, potentially monumental in effect—and, perhaps more important, a deliciously funny book, absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious.” In the daily Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt kicked off his ultimately unhappy career as a reviewer of Roth’s books by declaring Portnoy “a technical masterpiece” that brought “the genre of the socalled Jewish novel . . . to an end and a new point of departure.” For the most part, though, critics were rather evenly divided between those who admired the book and those who were offended by it—sometimes grievously—a division best represented in The Saturday Review: Roth appeared on the cover of an issue featuring both an endorsement by Granville Hicks (“very much like a masterpiece”) and “A Dissent” by Marya Mannes, a former Vogue editor, who bleakly predicted that “the mixture of bile, sperm, and self-indulgence that infuses most of Portnoy’s Complaint should put it on the best-seller lists.” She was not mistaken in that respect, nor would Roth have argued much with her reasoning; he later noted that his book’s pioneering treatment of a certain “shameful, solitary addiction” had served to attract “an audience that previously had shown little interest in my writing” (an indifference to which they would return).
The main dialectic of the novel—Jewish repression versus goyish license—was somewhat inspired by Isaac Rosenfeld’s “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” which equates the consumption of trafe with “the whole world of forbidden sexuality, the sexuality of the goyim, and there all the delights are imagined to lie, with the shiksas and shkotzim† who are unrestrained and not made kosher.” Growing up, Portnoy comes to associate the kosher laws with the relentless strictures imposed by his family, especially his mother, who evokes the specters of polio and colitis to frighten him away from hamburgers and french fries, lest he become like the “imbecilic eaters of the execrable” who gorge on “pigs and crabs and lobsters” and enjoy the kind of squalid sex that Alex longs to have with a dream shiksa, Thereal McCoy: “Her favorite line of English prose is a masterpiece: ‘Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.’ When I fart in the bathtub, she kneels naked on the tile floor, leans all the way over, and kisses the bubbles. She sits on my cock while I take a shit, plunging into my mouth a nipple the size of a tollhouse cookie. . . .” In a house where drinking a glass of milk is frowned on, Alex’s longing for such degradation is all the keener, and hence the more guilt-inducing: “My wang was all I really had that I could call my own,” he remarks of his main form of rebellion, most memorably with a piece of liver his mother then cooks for the family meal.
Roth’s treatment of Portnoy’s Uncle Hymie, the novel’s most vivid embodiment of small-minded Jewish insularity, was doubtless the sort of thing Kazin considered narrowly “psychological”—that is, lacking in “moral and even spiritual insight.” When Hymie’s son, Heshie, wants to marry a shiksa (a “Polack” at that), Hymie throws him to the floor and holds him there until “tears of surrender at last appeared on Heshie’s long dark Hollywood lashes. We are not a family that takes defection lightly.” Leaving nothing to chance, Hymie has already convinced his son’s fiancée that Heshie has an “incurable blood disease”—this before producing five twenty-dollar bills that the “dumb, frightened” girl accepts: “Thus proving something that everybody but Heshie (and I) had surmised about the Polack from the beginning: that her plan was to take Heshie for all his father’s money, and then ruin his life.” The pitiless—or even “savage,” as Kazin would have it—punch line comes when Heshie is killed in the war, whereupon Uncle Hymie and his wife are invariably consoled with the words “At least he didn’t leave you with a shikse wife.” When Herman (Hymie!) Roth used to tell the story of how Sender beat his son Ed to keep him from marrying “a worldly woman,” the young Philip was furious at his father’s vague approval (“They don’t have that kind of discipline anymore”) of a xenophobic brutality that had no place in American life. Like Herman, though, Kazin was the son of unassimilated Yiddish-speaking immigrants; whatever his own yearnings as an American intellectual, Kazin was sentimental about the tragic history of the Jews—going back to the shtetl and even “the desert”—in a way Roth was not.
“Doctor, what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred . . . or the love?” Portnoy asks, and Roth himself pointed out that “the book derives such emotional force as it has from its seesawing” between lyricism and farce. “[Portnoy’s] perspective is that of a wounded farceur, who takes delight in his own grievances—in that way (and only in that way) he is a distant relative of Mr. Sabbath.” The difference: Roth’s later hero Mickey Sabbath delights in his transgressions without a whit of Portnoy’s guilt—the guilt endemic to Nice Jewish Boys whose parents treated them “as unique as unicorns on the one hand,” and “selfish, evil little shits, little ingrates, on the other!” Portnoy remembers his mother’s friend Mrs. Nimkin, who could only think of her own sacrifice (“All the [piano] lessons we gave him”) when she finds her fifteen-year-old son Ronald hanging from the showerhead with a note pinned to his shirt: “Mrs. Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight. / Ronald.” But then, too, there was the whole tragic history to consider, and hence Kazin and the like were less impressed by Portnoy’s lyrical moments (“I fall asleep with my face against my mother’s black sealskin coat”) than by an outburst like “Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass—I happen to be a human being!” A few years later, Kazin was still musing in print over Portnoy’s awesome solipsism (“Whom do you suffer for, Alex P.? I suffer for me”), weighing the irony of all the “emancipated” Jews who relate to him: “ ‘Your book has so many readers!’ I once heard an admirer say to Roth. ‘Why,’ she continued enthusiastically, ‘you must have at least six million readers!’ ”
It was Bennett Cerf’s impression, when he addressed more than a thousand women at a Pittsburgh temple, that Roth’s detractors were outnumbered “10 to 1”—at any rate, the book was so successful that Random House could afford to take an almost jaunty tone toward readers who wrote in protest: “Difference of opinion . . . is what makes life interesting,” publicist Jean Ennis replied to Mrs. Peter J. Weiss, who’d expressed her wonder that such a respectable publisher had sullied its reputation with “this example of pornography, group defamation, exercise in a man’s abnormality,” and so on. Still, a suburban matron was one thing, and a stern Zionist intellectual like Marie Syrkin another; it’s pleasant to imagine how the affable Cerf, for one, would have parried such points as Syrkin raised in her Midstream review (“The Fun of Self-Abuse”), which treated Roth’s novel as a species of propaganda that would have gladdened the hearts of Goebbels and Streicher: “In both views the Jewish male is not drawn to a particular girl who is gentile, but by a gentile ‘background’ which he must violate sexually.”
Hard words, but hardest of all came from an even more eminent personage—the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, then president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and one of three recipients that year of the Yakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award. “This is the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying,” Scholem wrote in the Hebrew-language daily Haaretz.
We [Jews] will pay the price, not the author who revels in obscenities. . . . I daresay that with the next turn of history, not long to be delayed, this book will make all of us defendants at court. . . . This book will be quoted to us—and how it will be quoted! They will say to us: Here you have the testimony from one of your own artists . . . I wonder what price k’lal yisrael [the world Jewish community]—and there is such an entity in the eyes of the Gentiles—is going to pay for this book. Woe to us on that day of reckoning!
Roth didn’t learn of Scholem’s review until a visit to Israel in 1984, when a Tel Aviv professor gave him the gist of it and asked what he thought: “I said that history had obviously proved Scholem wrong: more than fifteen years had passed since the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint and not a single Jew had paid anything for the book, other than the few dollars it cost in the bookstore.” “Not yet,” the professor replied; “but the Gentiles will make use of it when the time is right.”‡
In 2013, when the politician Anthony Weiner was busted a second time for “sexting” in the midst of his comeback mayoral campaign in New York, the Times published a piece—“When Politics Catches Up with ‘Portnoy’ ”—about how such scandals were exploding “outdated cultural assumptions” about the decency of Jewish men. Eliot Spitzer—whose governorship of New York had ended five years earlier, when his fondness for high-priced prostitutes was discovered—was quoted in the article as follows: “I haven’t read a novel in thirty years, I’ve lived one.” “It’s bad for the Jews,” said Erica Jong, “and it makes the anti-Semites say, ‘See, I told you they’re animals.’ ” Claudia Roth Pierpont remembered that Roth was “convulsed” by the Spitzer affair, calling her up and insisting they meet for lunch to pore over newspapers together. “I was trying to establish some hifalutin complex theory about why [Spitzer] would want to destroy himself,” said Pierpont, “why a man would act so stupidly when he had so much to lose. Is there something self-destructive inherent? And Philip just looked at me and said: ‘No, honey. It’s just cock.’ ”