CHAPTER
Thirty-Two
IN THE SPRING OF 1981—AFTER A Y EAR CONSUMED BY Roth’s struggles over his second Zuckerman novel—he was asked to revise the David Magarshack translation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard for a production at the Chichester Festival in Sussex, where Bloom was cast as Madame Ranevskaya. Roth gave the festival good value for its nominal honorarium (about five hundred dollars, he recalled). Not only did he produce a modernized, smoothly colloquial script, but he also attended six weeks of rehearsals in London and put together a binder of some fifty typed pages of notes: “Her childhood, her innocence,” he wrote of Madame Ranevskaya. “What happened to it is the mystery puzzling her throughout the play, particularly when she isn’t speaking. I see her touching everything, going about picking things up that once were hers.” Reviews were mixed, though most agreed with The Telegraph that Bloom’s “fey performance” was “a devastating portrayal of a silly, shallow woman, destructive to all that she touches.”
Roth and Bloom were staying in Chichester for the run of the play, but drove up to London for a few days on Sunday, May 17. Before leaving, Roth had phoned his parents, as he did every Sunday, and was relieved to find his mother in good spirits. After a mostly healthy life, she’d been feeling tired and breathless lately, but was trying to walk a little farther each day along their street in Elizabeth; Philip told her he was looking forward to walking a full mile with her when she came to Connecticut that summer, and she laughed and promised to do her best. Then, around midnight, Herman called: while they were having dinner with friends that night, Bess had had a heart attack; it was bad, he said, and Philip immediately booked a morning flight on the Concorde. He was packed and getting back into bed, when Herman called again and admitted that Bess was dead and had been dead when he’d called the first time; he hadn’t wanted to shock his son. When Philip arrived in Elizabeth the next day, as he wrote in Patrimony, he found Sandy consoling their “devastated” father.
“She ordered New England clam chowder,” [Herman] told me as I kneeled beside him, still in my coat and holding his hand, “and I ordered Manhattan. When it came she said, ‘I don’t want this soup.’ I said, ‘Take mine—we’ll switch,’ but she was gone. Just slumped forward. Didn’t even fall. Made no trouble for anyone. The way she always did everything.”
Philip wrote a eulogy for the next day’s funeral, but was too emotional when the time came and gave it to the rabbi to read: “Life,” he wrote, “to be worth something, requires that out of the contradictions, despite the obstructions, order must be made anew every morning.”
Because she intended to live a worthy life, every morning and every day she went about the job of making order: order for a hard-working, exacting, ambitious husband; order for two temperamental, reflective, ambitious sons; order for sisters with difficult lives, for nieces and nephews with family problems, for grandsons to whom she dispensed not mere grandmothering but mothering as well. . . . [S]he proceeded with meticulous precision that we more readily associate with cutting diamonds than with performing the relentless daily chores of ordinary family life. But the daily chores of ordinary family life were just that to her—precious jewels to be cut to perfection and given to those she loved.
After the burial they returned to Herman’s apartment; Sandy and Philip were occupied with greeting mourners at the door and hadn’t noticed their father missing until Aunt Milly came rushing out of the bedroom. “You better go in there and do something, darling,” she whispered into Philip’s ear. “Your father’s throwing everything out.” Sure enough, Herman was busily emptying the closet and dresser drawers of his late wife’s clothing. “What good is this stuff anymore?” he said to his son, proposing to give everything to Jewish relief. Philip insisted he stop for now and go talk to his guests—struck the while by how weirdly composed his father seemed: “he was simply doing what he had done all his life: the next difficult job.”
As one may imagine, such a man had become a trial to live with—more of a trial—after he’d retired, in 1966, from managing fifty-two employees at the now thriving Maple Shade office of Metropolitan Life. Bess had been happy living in their garden apartment near her sisters Milly and Honey, but suddenly she had an obsessive, increasingly melancholic husband at home with her day and night. (“It’s like that joke,” said Milly’s daughter, Anne, who heard plenty about Aunt Bess’s tribulations: “ ‘I married you, but not for lunch.’ ”) For a while he tried volunteering at the Red Cross, the Veterans Hospital in East Orange, and even a friend’s hardware store; mostly, though, he stayed home bossing his wife around—telling her, for instance, how to make the bed more efficiently, without having to walk around it so many times, which wasn’t the sort of thing Bess needed help with. During a weekend visit to Connecticut, the summer before her death, she suddenly announced to Philip that she was considering divorce. “He doesn’t listen to what I say,” she wept. “He interrupts me all the time to talk about something else. When we’re out, that’s the worst. Then he won’t let me speak at all. If I start to, he just shuts me up.”
But of course Herman worshipped his wife—whom he invoked, always, as “my Bess”—and seemed scarcely aware that he was driving her crazy and quite possibly to the grave. On the lovely May day that she died, they’d walked three long city blocks to the drugstore; as Bess reported to Milly afterward, she was so exhausted she didn’t think she could make the return trip, but after a little rest on a bench Herman rousted her to her feet and on they went. This might have been on his mind the next day, when Philip heard him crying in the bathroom: “Mommy, Mommy, where are you, Mommy?” Philip gave his father five milligrams of Valium and a glass of warm milk before bed, then held his hand until he fell asleep.
ROTH ONCE REFLECTED that there was usually about a ten-year gap between his life and his writing (versus, he said, less than twenty-four hours for Updike), and almost ten years exactly would pass between the time he started a novel, in 1979, tentatively titled Fiasco or A Star Is Born, and wrote the following, in 1969, to Tom Rogers: “All I can report so far about becoming a celebrity is that it is silly in the extreme and is only useful as it is a possible subject for future fictions.” The main genesis of Roth’s trilogy about “the unreckoned consequences of a life in art” had derived from his observations of literary life in Czechoslovakia, “where nothing goes and everything matters,” juxtaposed with that of the States, “where everything goes and nothing matters.” Thus an early draft of Zuckerman Unbound was divided neatly into two parts. The first was a tabulation of morbidities suffered by Zuckerman as a result of writing Carnovsky and so becoming the world’s most famous sex freak, and the second entails his flight abroad with his mother, whom a crazed fan has threatened to kidnap. While in Prague, Zuckerman attends an orgy at a film director’s palazzo, where he encounters the elderly would-be translator of Carnovsky, Kapper, who explains, “In this small country the writers have a great burden to bear: they make not only art, they must make general decency and the public conscience.” Bloom read this draft and declared it “brilliant,” but Roth (“she gets paid to say things like that”) decided the thematic implications were “too obvious” and put aside the entirety of his Czech material for the trilogy’s epilogue, The Prague Orgy, to be published four years later: “In order for Prague to have the impact upon the reader that it originally had on me,” he said, “I had to write a 697-page introduction.”
The Promethean import of Zuckerman Unbound relates, ironically, to the title hero’s determination to “let the repellent in” (as Roth liked to say) by writing about his perverse alter ego, Carnovsky, and hence freeing himself and his readers from a degree of civilization’s constraints. However, by sabotaging his own “dignified, high-minded gravity”—as his worldly agent, Andre, puts it—Zuckerman becomes all the more alienated from what Flaubert had wistfully called le vrai: “Ils sont dans le vrai” (“They are in the truth”), Flaubert had remarked, watching a young mother prosaically tending her children. Zuckerman is isolated foremost from the loved ones for whom he’d once aspired to be virtuous: “Cold-hearted betrayer of the most intimate confessions, cutthroat caricaturist of your own loving parents, graphic reporter of encounters with women to whom you have been deeply bound by trust, by sex, by love—no, the virtue racket ill becomes you.” As for the vrai writ large—the philistine public—far from being grateful for the fruits of Zuckerman’s insight, they mistake “impersonation for confession” and charge him with the sins of his hero. Utterly alone, and creatively impotent, Zuckerman is reduced to watching nonstop TV (“There was little else he could concentrate on”), at one point savoring the absurdity of listening to three therapists analyze “his castration complex” on channel 5.
Perhaps the most formidable personification of the vrai is a former quiz-show whiz, Alvin Pepler, a fellow Newarker who follows Zuckerman around New York maniacally reciting song titles in the precise order they appeared on the Hit Parade.* Pepler—whom Roth described to a friend as “the first of the father’s avengers”—also believes that Carnovsky is a true confession, but goes one better, furiously accusing the author of appropriating the hero’s “hang-ups” from Pepler’s own life. To prove his point, he mails Zuckerman the handkerchief he’d borrowed the day before (while eating Zuckerman’s sandwich), which is now redolent of a telltale “acrid odor.” “JERK OFF ARTIST KILLS BARD OF JERKING OFF,” Zuckerman imagines the headlines screaming; “ZUCKERMAN KILLED BY ONANIST’S HAND.” The next “avenger” is Zuckerman’s younger brother, Henry, who assures Nathan that their dying father wasn’t referring to Nixon or Lyndon Johnson with his last word on earth: “You are a bastard,” Henry weeps. “A heartless conscienceless bastard. . . . Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families—everything is grist for your fun-machine.” After Henry assures him that it was, in fact, Nathan’s book that killed their father, Zuckerman becomes unbound in every sense. Pausing in a limo outside his childhood home in the now dangerous, riot-devastated Weequahic section, he reflects: “You are no longer any man’s son, you are no longer some good woman’s husband, you are no longer your brother’s brother, and you don’t come from anywhere anymore, either.”
After the craftsmanly Ghost Writer, critics were a little disappointed by Zuckerman Unbound—a slender yet diffuse novel that was “reasonably funny, reasonably sad, reasonably interesting, and, occasionally, just plain reasonable,” as Broyard wrote in his representative New York Times review. As ever, Roth affected not to pay attention to the newspaper of record, while being so enraptured by Edward Rothstein’s long, thoughtful analysis in The New York Review of Books (“the most intelligent I’ve gotten in twenty-two years”) that he pressed Aaron Asher to invite the young man to dinner so Roth could meet him in person. Rothstein’s review—“The Revenge of the Vrai”—conceded that Zuckerman Unbound seemed “impoverished” on a superficial reading, especially in comparison to its predecessor, but was in fact “disturbing and challenging. . . . It asks that something be made of it, that it be understood, treated with more care than Nathan’s Carnovsky is by the reading public. Zuckerman Unbound is almost the story of a book being misread—by its author as well as by its readers—chaotically mixing the real with the imagined.”
And life would go on imitating art with a vengeance. In The Observer, Martin Amis derisively described Roth’s latest as “an autobiographical novel about what it is like to write autobiographical novels,” whereas the Times sent a culture reporter, Michiko Kakutani—soon to become its most indefatigable book critic—to interview him about this burning issue (“Is Roth Really Writing about Roth?”): “Those who convert literature into gossip don’t get what reading’s all about,” Roth explained, ticking off the various ways his life differed from Zuckerman’s (he didn’t have a younger brother; his father was still alive; nobody ever tried to kidnap his mother, etc.). As for the subject of “self-travesty” in general, Roth’s favorite analogy would always be Jack Benny, who was rumored to be a very generous man, though he found it funnier to play a miser on the radio.
ON FEBRUARY 23, 1981—following certain financial disagreements with Roger Straus—Aaron Asher departed Farrar, Straus and Giroux to become executive editor at Harper & Row, where he’d been hired by his former employer’s son, Roger Straus III, who’d dutifully sought his father’s blessing: “I’d be delighted,” said the latter, “help yourself.” Two days after Asher’s departure, the Daily News ran a story about the “great speculation” in publishing circles as to whether the legendary editor’s authors—“most notably Philip Roth and Brian Moore”—would follow him; Asher himself seemed sanguine. “Yes,” he replied, when asked about the two notables, “—and that’s plural.”
Where Roth was concerned, after all, Asher was not only a superb editor but one of his closest friends, and their scribbled exchanges on Roth’s manuscripts often read like so much wacky banter: Querying the phrase “Since my discharge” in The Ghost Writer, Asher noted that it put him in mind of “a leaky cock,” to which Roth scribbled back, “You must have your reasons. Stet.” One of the first books Asher bought at Harper was Bloom’s Limelight and After, which he shepherded along with courtly tact (“I’m at work on your text, dear Claire, not that it needs much”). Indeed, he and Roth were en rapport in almost every literary and political aspect, and while in London it was Asher’s “intelligence and conversation” that Roth missed most.
Ten months after Asher’s departure from FSG, Roth asked his opinion (as ever) of “Zuckerman III”—what would become The Anatomy Lesson—whereupon Asher decided it was time to lay his cards on the table: “I’ll put in writing my offer of $100,000+ for it,” he wrote. Since he knew Roth planned to publish his trilogy, once it was finished, as a single book—Zuckerman Bound—and was therefore reluctant to change publishers in the midst of things, Asher sought to reassure him: “Trilogyshmilogy,” he wrote, promising that Harper would match FSG’s design of the first two volumes and “surpass them in sales.” “This is a legal document,” he concluded. “Happy 1982.”
Five months passed, until Roth sent another draft of his work in progress to Asher, meanwhile assuring Straus that this was simply a matter of old friendship: “He understands this, I understand this, and I want you to understand it too. New York is a city world-famous for scuttle-butt and I don’t want any false and malicious scuttle-butt drifting back to you.” In fact, Asher wouldn’t fully understand until seven months later, when Roth definitely informed him, at last, that he’d decided to stay with FSG—and still he requested yet another reading of his work in progress, but not if it gave Asher false hope that Roth would follow him to Harper & Row.
Asher’s response was remarkably magnanimous. He wrote Roth that he’d begun to get the message over the past couple of years, and so had become reticent about “wooing” him further. But now that Roth’s decision was final, Asher wished to speak frankly: “Roger is an amoral shit who has done and continues to do me injury. That a dear friend who also happens to be among the very best of writers chooses to stay with him doesn’t exactly cheer me. Of course I understand your reasons: the trilogy, the earlier books (including foreign rights), . . . your desire for stability.” Asher couldn’t help wondering, though, whether Roth was feeling sensitive (not for the first time) about being perceived as greedy, or perhaps he coveted the vaunted “prestige” of FSG? If so, Asher assured him that the “New York chatterers” would simply assume he’d “followed a respected editor” who also happened to be a friend. Be that as it may: Roth’s decision to stay with Roger—a man “not all that widely loved or respected in the trade,” Asher allowed himself to say—was “something of an embarrassment to me.” The next day Asher decided such a tack was unseemly, and wrote a final note emphasizing that Roth’s conduct in the matter had been “exemplary, and, in fact, I owe you an apology for the distraction my move has caused you.” He forbore to mention that Roth had taken an awfully long time coming to the point—this while Asher gladly continued to exert his skills on Roth’s (and Bloom’s) behalf—but at least Roth hadn’t asked a third party to lower the boom, as he had with Joe Fox.
Another factor in Roth’s decision was his fondness for Asher’s replacement, David Rieff, the brilliant son of a former Penn colleague, Philip Rieff, as well as the celebrated intellectual Susan Sontag, with whom Roth had conducted a “very brief friendship” that would later puzzle him. Sontag enjoyed considerable sway over Roger Straus, and her son had been hired as a senior editor right out of college; some people thought he was sensitive on that point, and hence given to a kind of pretentious flamboyance. With characteristic asperity Kazin noted in his diary that “little David Rieff, Susie Sunday’s cupid bow son” was among those present chez Roth for Thanksgiving 1986: “But oh my, little Rieff,” he wrote, “so knowing, so full of literary insideness like his phony ma.” That said, even Asher considered him “very bright and very competent,” though he was known to neglect authors who ranked low on the greasy pole; he let Seven Thousand Days in Siberia, by Karlo Stajner, languish in limbo so long that his colleagues dubbed it “Seven Thousand Days on David’s Desk.”
But Roth would always rank high, and therefore got the best of Rieff—tactful, attentive, humorous, shrewd—though the two were, at least superficially, very different people. “Look, David,” Roth said, trying to explain a formulation in his prose: “remember when you were thirteen and you thought everybody was Jewish?” Rieff burst out laughing: “Philip, when I was thirteen I thought the whole world was gay and Hispanic, and I was right.” Roth saw his point: Years ago he’d been on a panel with the bisexual Sontag, and her young son, David, was there and very much a part of her world (albeit straight himself). No wonder, then, that Rieff was—as Roth put it—“about brains and intelligence how a rich kid was about money. He was surrounded by it, and he couldn’t tolerate anything else.” In that respect they were perfectly attuned.
Around this time, Roth sought additional help from a woman he would come to call his “secret weapon,” Roslyn Schloss. “I am willing to suggest that she has had more of an influence on the quality of Philip’s prose than anybody at all,” said Conarroe,† who’d worked with Schloss at the Modern Language Association and considered her “the best copy editor who ever lived.” On Conarroe’s recommendation Roth phoned her in the spring of 1983, when long galleys of The Anatomy Lesson were ready, and said he’d like to try out her services for a reasonable fee. He was staying at the Wyndham Hotel in New York—his invariable address in the city after he gave up his apartment on East Eighty-first Street—where Schloss showed up with her dictionaries and mechanical pencils (“I looked like some kind of call girl,” she remembered, “only with dictionaries and mechanical pencils”); they ended up spending hours together, minutely discussing each correction, the kind of conversation Roth relished. Henceforth Schloss worked on every one of Roth’s books, and was perhaps better acquainted with this preeminent aspect of his obsessiveness than anybody. Once, while visiting Balzac’s cottage in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, Schloss scanned the heavily scored manuscripts lining the walls and thought, “They ain’t seen nothing.” Roth especially loved going to town on his galleys, since seeing his work in print for the first time was seeing it afresh: “Suddenly, lapses of thought, excesses of description, errors of style and even conception can become clear to you,” he said, “just because of the change in format.” And the more Roth loved a given novel, the more he and Schloss were apt to scrutinize multiple galleys, as in the case of Sabbath’s Theater. “A five-bladed fan suspended on a long stem from the ceiling at the foot of the bed,” he’d written, which she emended to “A five-bladed ceiling fan hanging from a long stem above the foot of the bed”: Yes, Roth scribbled in the margin—again and again. After a particularly feverish session back and forth one night, via fax, Roth signed off gratefully at last with his signature Flair pen: “And he said yes and yes and he said Yes! / Goodnight!”
WHILE LIVING IN the States from (usually) June to October, Roth liked more and more to stay put in Connecticut, where he could pursue his favorite activities sans distraction: writing, reading, swimming, walking—but mostly writing. Bloom, who was with him roughly half the time, would summon him from his studio to dinner with an old, raucously clanging bell, until Roth got a second, incoming-call-accepting phone line to which only she and the odd other had the number. For recreation the two would sit in a little screened geodesic dome on the lawn, where they could commune with nature while reading. “I say ssh a lot,” said Roth.
Some were bemused by the extent to which Bloom acquiesced to her hausfrau role, not to say the extent to which Roth encouraged and slightly ridiculed this. Though he often cooked for himself when necessary, Roth was happy to let his illustrious companion handle almost every aspect of dinner otherwise, from cooking to serving hors d’oeuvres to guests (while they chatted with Roth) to cleaning up afterward. When a detail was muffed, Roth was likely to observe “It’s hard to get good help these days” or words to that effect. Jonathan Brent, who was interviewing Roth for the Chicago Tribune, spent a night in Connecticut during the summer of 1983; he was startled when Bloom appeared the next morning in a pinafore and apron to serve him breakfast. “I can’t believe that the most beautiful woman in the world just made breakfast for me,” he remarked to Roth, who sighed, “It gets tired.” What Roth meant, in part, was the playacting side of Bloom’s domestic ministrations. “She had a child’s fantasy of life,” he said.
Where they particularly differed, in Warren as in London, was on the subject of social life. Roth was becoming such a recluse that he rejoiced over the energy crisis of the late seventies, because there was very little gas: “We don’t go anywhere,” he exulted to Alvarez. “AND NOBODY COMES HERE.” As for Bloom, she was a city person who loved parties, and life in the woods was becoming, for her, a serious bummer. One of their parlor games, as a couple, was improvising dialogue whenever Roth needed to write a realistic scene between a man and a woman; in this respect, he thought, they came closest to being a latter-day Chekhov and Knipper. One day, while working on The Ghost Writer, he asked Bloom to describe what it was like living in the country with a writer. As she wrote in Doll’s House, her response was used “almost verbatim” in the novel: “ ‘We don’t go anywhere! We don’t do anything! We don’t see anyone!’ And so it went: wearing the mask of Hope Lanoff [sic], the writer’s wife, I savored each moment.”
Under the circumstances Roth could hardly begrudge Bloom’s “precious” friendship with Francine du Plessix Gray, reassuring himself that she kept their neighbor basically in perspective. In his 1985 diary, he recorded her critique of Gray’s new novel, October Blood, as the “work of ‘a lunatic,’ ” and in fact Bloom often referred to the woman as Loony on returning from one of their walks, during which Gray was wont to educate her on some fine point in Ibsen’s (or whoever’s) work. “Francine has a wonderful way of saying stupid things with great authority,” said Conarroe, who remembered walking home with Roth (“just about to explode”) after a night of listening to Gray extol, say, the perspicacity of talk-show host Phil Donahue. Some observed that Roth was becoming more and more brazenly abrasive toward Gray, who, as their mutual friend Inga Larsen remarked, “was like a little child wanting to have his attention.”
Back in London, meanwhile, a truce of sorts seemed to obtain, for a time, between Roth and Anna Steiger. When he was told that Anna was insecure about her writing, Roth sent her a letter “teeming with typographical errors and ungrammatical English,” as Bloom remembered, and even Anna admitted that the two had had a similar sense of humor and “saw eye to eye” on “many subjects”; she also conceded that he was “very interested” in her singing and perceptive in his feedback. Indeed, many attest to Roth’s heartfelt admiration for Steiger’s talent. He insisted that a celebrated countertenor, Russell Oberlin, come to Guildhall to hear her perform, and Oberlin never forgot how intently both Roth and Bloom (who coached Anna about movement) watched and listened. Roth made a point of attending all her recitals, and sent flowers when she appeared at Wigmore Hall as the winner of the Richard Tauber Prize.
But in most respects their family life was still a strain. “The more I tried to make up to Anna for my past mistakes,” Bloom wrote in Doll’s House, “the more Philip resented the attention I paid her.” “I was invisible,” said Roth. “When I spoke at dinner Anna pointedly didn’t listen, and regardless of what I may have said, Bloom didn’t bother to listen either and instead, barely able to tolerate my interference, turned the conversation instantly back to Anna, flummoxed and in a panic should Anna feel insufficiently regarded.” After dinner Bloom would disappear to the third floor, where she and her daughter would either listen to opera or “watch television while nestling together under the covers of Anna’s bed,” according to Roth, who “read alone and went to bed alone” and was either asleep or feigning sleep by the time Bloom (“still warm from snuggling Anna’s body”) came to bed.
While in London, at least, Roth looked forward to going out for dinner, since he was thereby spared the tensions of Fawcett Street; all too often, though, he’d arrive at the restaurant to find Anna—secretly invited by her mother—waiting for them. The same occurred when he and Bloom checked in at the Hotel de l’Université in Paris for a much anticipated visit with Milan Kundera. At dinner Kundera brought along the impressive young intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, with whom Roth would, in time, form a friendship; that first night, however, was consumed with talk about the French-speaking Anna’s musical career, while the monoglot Roth sat stewing. Afterward Bloom proposed they fix her up with Finkielkraut.
Little wonder Roth spent longer and longer intervals at his Notting Hill studio, where the mini-fridge was stocked entirely with Stolichnaya vodka. Many nights he’d linger as late as eight o’clock or so, reading in his Eames chair and tippling; it was the only period in his life when he became a rather heavy drinker.
ONE OF ROTH’S BEST friends in Connecticut was his physician, C. H. (Camille Henry) Huvelle, a peppy Princeton graduate who was chief of staff at nearby Charlotte Hungerford Hospital in Torrington. Each June, on coming home for the summer, Roth would get his yearly physical from Huvelle, who was apt to declare him “fit as a fiddle”—a man in his forties, after all, who was still at his college weight. When Roth was examined in 1982, however, Huvelle found an abnormality on his EKG: The T-waves were “flipped,” he said, which might be a fluke; Roth returned the next day for two more tests—one at rest, the other after running around the block—and the ominous result was confirmed. Huvelle referred him to a cardiologist at Waterbury Hospital, Victor Hurst, whereupon a thallium stress test and X-rays indicated a deadly occlusion of the left anterior descending (LAD) artery and an 80 percent occlusion of the posterior descending artery. At age forty-nine, in short, Roth was suffering from “significant” coronary artery disease—all the more disconcerting a year after his mother had died from a massive heart attack. To be sure, heart disease was rife among the Finkels, but Roth thought his own reckoning might have been delayed another ten years or so, were it not for his fateful move to Fawcett Street. In 2012—miraculously still alive, thirty years later—Roth noted: “I believe now that the strain and stress generated by my life in that household was not an insignificant cause of the sudden onset of heart disease in a healthy, vigorous, slender, temperate, well-exercised nonsmoker not yet fifty.”
Dr. Hurst decided that a bypass operation was too risky, given the location of Roth’s occlusions, and treated him instead with various medications, including the beta-blocker Corgard. Roth was also enjoined to alter his diet: no more red meat, chicken with skin, dairy products of any kind, eggs, salt, and so on. “Work on book as though death is imminent,” Roth scribbled in his diary. “Winded walking up a rise. Will I die?” The only nondoctors he told were Bloom, Inga Larsen, his brother, the Alvarezes, and his then executors, Conarroe and Miles, whom he directed to look after Claire if he died, and to see that his trilogy was published in one volume “twelve to sixteen months after the hardcover publication of The Anatomy Lesson.”
Another stress test, almost two months later, suggested the medications were working beyond all hope—though the beta-blocker had a most unfortunate side effect: “I couldn’t accept the impotence as a permanent condition,” Roth remembered. He implored the cardiologist to let him have bypass surgery and damn the risk, but the man could not condone it; Roth thought Dr. Huvelle “might understand better,” but that worldly man, too, insisted that his friend’s heart was the more important organ. A different beta-blocker, Lopressor, also caused impotence, and finally Roth determined to contain his disease with a regimen of diet and exercise and whatever medications were helpful but not positively lethal to his potency, which would remain a little compromised going forward: “I could override it in exciting situations,” said Roth, “and I was in an exciting situation”—meaning (mostly) Inga.
Then, on May 13, 1983—almost two years to the day after Bess Roth’s fatal heart attack—Bloom’s mother, Alice, also succumbed to heart disease, in the back parlor of her antique shop on Walton Street, where she’d lived with her dog. “Visit C’s mother,” Roth had noted a few months before. “Frail from chest infection. She’s sure she is dying—and she looks it. Gray.” Roth was fond of the old woman: Alice, like her daughter, was curious about his experience as an American Jew, and they’d chat about suchlike matters when he happened to be in the neighborhood or when she came for dinner two or three times a month. He was at his studio when Bloom phoned him with the news, and went directly to Walton Street to join Bloom and her sister-in-law, Sheila, sitting with the body. “It took courage on his part to do this,” Bloom wrote in Doll’s House, “taking into account his inordinate fear of the dead.” Alice Bloom, in fact, was his “first corpse”—duly noted in his diary—but the most macabre part was yet to come. As he remembered, “Bloom seemed strangely lighthearted while Sheila, who was ordinarily so accessible, seemed unusually constrained.” Roth watched, bemused, as Bloom “stroked her mother’s hair, kissed her face, fondled her hands,” chatting the while, and occasionally shook one of her own hands in the air as though it were hurting her. Presently Sheila took Roth aside and explained that a man from Kenyon’s funeral home had come to remove the body, and Bloom had struck him while he stood in the doorway, causing the startled man to depart.
“The following day,” Roth wrote, “Bloom awakened early and hurried over to her mother’s house with her embroidery.” He returned to Walton Street that afternoon and found Bloom still chatting with her mother’s body while she worked on her needlepoint. A man from Kenyon’s stopped by to suggest that they allow one of their people to give the dead woman “an injection” if they planned to keep her at home any longer. It was dark when the embalmer arrived, carrying two large suitcases, and Roth suggested that Bloom go home and let him deal with it. “At the request of Kenyon’s embalmer,” he remembered, “I helped carry Alice’s body from the sofa to the middle of the floor of the darkened room on which he had laid a sheet. . . .
He lifted Alice by the legs and I took her by the shoulders, and as we moved her I balanced her head up against my legs so that it didn’t roll backward. I noticed her jewelry then and realized that if Kenyon’s embalmer was preparing Alice for her funeral and cremation, the jewelry should be removed and given to Bloom. He took her ring off easily and handed it to me and then I held her head up off the floor while he unscrewed her earrings.
Once Alice had been removed, at last, to the funeral home, her daughter promptly paid her another visit. Roth stopped by on his way home from Notting Hill and found Bloom laughing and chatting as ever. “I am appalled,” he recorded in handwritten notes from the time.
How far is this going to go? . . . I think, “I’ll never be able to make love to this woman again. She is killing sex forever, playing with this dead body.” . . . [After returning home that evening, Bloom] Rushes right into the kitchen and in her coat without washing her hands or face begins to prepare the dinner. I cannot take anymore. “Claire, you must wash. You are grossly offending my sensibilities. I cannot take anymore of this. . . . This has become entirely morose and macabre. Your mother is a dead person. She is not a doll to play with. You must stop!”
According to Roth’s notes, Bloom apologized and went upstairs to wash up, later explaining that she’d ill advisedly taken two Miltowns, a powerful sedative.
Given the whole ordeal,‡ Roth took a dim view of Bloom’s reference in Doll’s House to his “inordinate fear of the dead,” retorting that he didn’t even have “an ordinary fear of the dead.” This, however, was hardly true at the time. Alice’s corpse was his first because he’d been “afraid” (as he admitted in notes) to view his own mother’s at the funeral parlor. “Alice lying there dead from my disease,” he wrote at the time. “That is the disease named on the death certificate—the same one that appears on my doctor’s bills: ischaemic heart disease [i.e., coronary artery disease]. . . . I keep thinking now that my death will be soon.”