CHAPTER
Thirty-Three
BLOOM’S SPIRITS IMPROVED WHEN HER CAREER WAS going well, so Roth continued to help where he could. After the brief resurgence of Brideshead Revisited, she was in a rut again, finding that if “she refused to do the crap,” as Roth reported to Conarroe, she didn’t work at all. Casting about for more prestigious vehicles, Roth hit on Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, about the author’s long imprisonment in Stalin’s gulags. He wrote a pilot script for what he hoped would be a BBC miniseries, but when he sought permission from Ginzburg’s son, Vasily Aksyanov, the man said there was already Hollywood interest and turned him down.
Meanwhile a TV adaptation of The Ghost Writer had been commissioned by director Tristram Powell (son of Anthony, the English novelist), and this he showed to the appalled Roth, who offered to write it himself. “I had to,” he told Stern, “or the whole thing would have fallen through because of the fucked-up asinine job that was done by the screenwriter, who had to be paid off, though I would gladly have murdered him for nothing.” As it happened, Powell wrote a subsequent draft (“winnowing out stuff I wouldn’t have the heart to cut myself”), which Roth polished into final form. He also arranged for Bloom to play the part of Hope Lonoff, putting her through the usual hectic rehearsal paces in Connecticut, and also asking his friend Polly Hanson—the genteel Yankee who ran the office at Yaddo—to make a tape of her voice so Bloom would have a better idea of a proper New England accent.
“I was now to be educated in the mildly agonizing art of giving your work over to others to realize as they see fit,” Roth wrote in a promotional piece for TV Guide (“How Could They Capture My Hero’s Obsession with Anne Frank?”), which appeared a few days before the show aired to open the third season of PBS’s American Playhouse on January 17, 1984. In this case the “agonizing” part mostly had to do with the performance of Mark Linn-Baker as the young Nathan Zuckerman: Roth was always dissatisfied with screen portrayals of his own alter egos, as they were never “forceful” enough; for The Ghost Writer he’d spent two days observing the shoot in Vermont, fuming over the “cute, coy, girlish smile” that Linn-Baker flashed, as Roth saw it, after almost every utterance. Later he complained to Powell that an otherwise creditable production had been all but ruined by the actor’s effeminacy (“When Lonoff says his work is full of ‘turbulence,’ it’s a joke—how could it be?”), and got a bit of his own back in his TV Guide piece, pointedly noting that Nathan “must never be played engagingly, like some college-educated Henry Aldrich advertising boyish innocence.” No less than Updike, however, singled out Linn-Baker’s performance in a collegial note he wrote Roth the day after the broadcast: “I thought the young man who played Zuckerman conveyed wonderfully the deceptive baby fat of the young writer, all awkwardness and peach fuzz on the outside, all glitter and hunger within.”
A few months earlier—the day, in fact, Roth had viewed a rough cut of The Ghost Writer at BBC headquarters in White City—he met the woman who would become his main sexual partner in London for the next few years. (Using his heart condition as a pretext, Roth had told Bloom that their relationship would have to be chaste from now on, which left him with the problem of how to conceal his morning erections: “Like a shot,” he said, “I’d speed to the bathroom to pee . . . my hands all I had for a fig leaf.”) Emma Smallwood,* herself a BBC employee, was preparing a program on American Jews when she first phoned Roth on Fawcett Street; “enchanted” by her lovely posh accent, Roth asked her to meet him for lunch in Covent Garden. The person attached to the accent proved to be a slender, pretty thirty-year-old with dark red hair, and Roth was struck not only by her beauty but her quietly ironical wit; after lunch he insisted she share a cab with him all the way to White City. A second lunch ensued, whereupon they learned that respective trips to New York would shortly coincide, and while in the city Emma came to his room at the Wyndham.
“The rest was a devastating love affair,” Roth remembered, “—devastating because she was married and had a small child and a husband she could no longer stand and I was living with Claire and Anna, equally unhappily.” Emma lived near Roth’s studio, and would often stop by on her way home from work; after sex on the rug or in the Eames chair, she’d sit in his lap and chat about the day’s events while he listened and played with her hair and ears. (“Pause while we cry,” he said in the telling of it.) Sometimes she’d bring along her two-year-old, and the little girl would also sit in Roth’s lap and bang away at his typewriter. But mostly Emma came alone, and liltingly answered his many questions (“I learned everything about England from [Emma]”) while he basked in the radiance of her fluency. “After her secretive visits to my studio I would feverishly try to remember and write down the most elegantly succulent of her locutions,” he said, explaining how he came to create the hyperarticulate heroines of The Counterlife and Deception: “I was so possessed by memory that those lovely compound sentences just came pouring out of me in an act of mimicry and homage.” When Bloom wondered about the model for the winsome Maria Freshfield in the first novel, Roth claimed she was based on Janet Hobhouse—a persuasive decoy, given the latter’s accent and such details as the “deus ex machina” that had, in fact, derived from that pre-Bloom affair.
Around this time, too, he met a woman who was briefly a lover and a lifelong friend thereafter. As he mentioned to Miss Martin, he’d been reading a “remarkable biography” of Isak Dinesen (“Not horrifying at all, but hypnotic”) by Judith Thurman, to whom he conveyed his admiration in a separate letter; the following month, March, he was coming to New York to deliver The Anatomy Lesson and celebrate his fiftieth birthday,† and perhaps Thurman would like to meet him at the Wyndham for a drink? Thurman, thrilled, replied that she happened to be “a longtime fan” (while wondering whether he was actually “Philip Roth the Indian chief, or Philip Roth the candlestick maker”). In the midst of divorcing her first husband, she wanted to make the most of this meeting with one of her favorite writers, and so consulted her Chinese therapist (“a very wise woman”) as to the best way to proceed. “Ask him what his sexual fantasies are,” the woman advised. “My fantasies . . .?” said Roth, delighted by the gambit.
“He values complicity very highly,” said Thurman. “You laugh in the same places. You’re well matched, there’s this sort of game and no one lets go of the rope, so the tension is sort of constant.” Thurman pointed out that her rapport with Roth was “hardwired,” even down to a genealogical level: “We’re these avian Jews from Kiev,” she said, noting their spindly frames—though kindred features, and natures, in their case, never quite translated into sexual chemistry. Roth was inhibited by the beta-blocker during their first meeting at the Wyndham, and while they eventually slept together now and then, “it never really worked,” said Roth, “so it dwindled off into a friendship.” Thurman, for her part, would not have said “dwindled”; she found that being Roth’s close friend was “preferable to being one of his women.”
Not least among the benefits, for Roth, was gaining another superlative reader—as he learned when Thurman critiqued his latest manuscript. Colette’s future biographer told him how Jenny would likely react to Zuckerman’s gift of a thousand dollars (“What’s this for?”), before blowing it on sexy expensive clothing; Roth duly altered the scene in question. She moreover congratulated him on this “admirable” line from Zuckerman (qua the pornographer Appel), which she called a “little bildungsroman in miniature”: “ ‘I can tell people a thousand times that I’m a serious person, but it’s hard for them to take at face value when the prosecution holds up Lickety Split and on the cover is a white girl sucking a big black cock and simultaneously fucking a broom.’ ” Thurman was “a girl after my own heart,” Roth replied, and promptly instructed his lawyer, Helene Kaplan, to revise his will so that Thurman was named his official biographer: “As my biographer-to-be . . .,” he’d occasionally remind her over the years.
IN 1983, after six years of working on his trilogy, Roth found himself “mentally exhausted” and decided to take his first summer off since his trip to Europe in 1958. On the one hand he felt sick of writing and pondered (or pretended to ponder) other ways to fill his remaining years, while on the other he suspected he was just getting started: “As if it’s all been apprentice work in some strange way,” he told a Washington Post interviewer. “I feel I’m in charge now, in tune with my talent.”
Amid such idleness he reminded George Plimpton that, twenty years ago, he (Roth) had promised to do a Paris Review interview at age fifty, and the time had come. Plimpton’s response was immediate: “One of the reasons we have kept the magazine chugging along is so that we could get to your goddam fiftieth birthday and get that interview done!” Indeed, Roth already had an interviewer in mind. Recently he’d read a short monograph about his work by a young critic and lecturer at the University of York, Hermione Lee, who announced on the first page: “Now that he is no longer the enfant terrible of American-Jewish fiction, but a highly respected novelist in his middle years, it is possible to take stock of Philip Roth’s achievement—of the range and quality of his work, and of his status as a ‘contemporary writer.’ ” Roth, unused to such well-considered tenderness, wrote the author a warm note (one of the very few he’d ever write to an academic) and proposed they meet for lunch at Thompson’s. As he notified Plimpton, Roth “liked her enormously,” and vice versa. “There’s nobody else in my life who makes me laugh so much,” she said of Roth twenty-five years later, long after she’d become “Lipschitz” to him (because her father was Jewish), another first-stringer among his stable of manuscript readers.
Roth knew his Paris Review interview would become a touchstone for readers interested in his work and person, and approached the task with due squeamishness. Early that summer he and Lee had talked for three days at the Royal Automobile Club, and afterward she sent him the tapes and a transcript. Roth replied: “(1) I couldn’t stand most of what I said, (2) the transcription wasn’t always accurate”; he asked Lee to point out the interesting parts, once she received the corrected transcript, since he himself found “the sound of my own voice and what the voice is saying Yet Again boring in the fucking extreme.” Lee rose to the occasion by “ruthlessly” pruning the interview from 182 to 32 pages, while striving “to keep the feel of a conversation”; Roth, in turn, acknowledged her hard work (“you’ve found the best of it”), while noting a little doubtfully that the whole thing would need to be “sharpened.” Then he went silent for six months. When his revised copy materialized at last, it had been sharpened almost beyond recognition: “I seem to remember that I had to fight a bit to keep my questions as I had asked them,” said Lee.
Roth used the interview to address some of the more galling aspects of his reputation—the most galling by far being that he was a confessional writer and hard on women. When Lee asked (or when Roth made her ask) about the relationship between the death of Zuckerman’s parents and the death of his own, Roth offered to give her Herman’s phone number in Elizabeth. As for the second issue: while editing their original transcript, Lee had done Roth a great favor by deleting “a shameless and unprovoked attack on a bunch of feminist midgets,” as she wrote him at the time. This prompted Roth to take an opposite approach, affecting gentle mystification on the whole point: “What is it?” he asked, when Lee wondered what he made of the “feminist attack” on him:
Q: The force of the attack would be, in part, that the female characters are unsympathetically treated, for instance that Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good is hostilely presented.
A: Don’t elevate that by calling it a “feminist” attack. That’s just stupid reading.
Which led nicely, as intended, to a long explication of Lucy’s more sympathetic qualities. While Roth almost certainly confected the whole exchange, or most of it, Lee could be a rigorous foil when the spirit moved her. “I think he thinks I’m more a fully paid-up conventional feminist than I think I am,” she remarked in 2007, and certainly her 1982 monograph about Roth is uncommonly nuanced on the subject, conceding four (versus the usual two or three) basic female types in his fiction: “overprotective mothers,” “monstrously unmanning wives,” “consoling, tender, sensible girlfriends,” and “recklessly libidinous sexual objects.” Once, after she’d been a little too persistent in a “feminist” line of questioning during a radio interview with Roth, he phoned her at home in Yorkshire as she was about to leave for dinner with friends; his harangue went on so long that she finally had to tell her friends to go ahead without her.
“On the pendulum of self-exposure that oscillates between aggressively exhibitionistic Mailerism and sequestered Salingerism,” Roth wrote in The Facts, “I’d say that I occupy a midway position, trying in the public arena to resist gratuitous prying or preening without making too holy a fetish of secrecy and seclusion.” So important to Roth was his completed Zuckerman Trilogy, however, that he erred a little on the side of Mailerism this time, consenting to more vulgar forms of publicity than The Paris Review. “What happened to us?” he said to his friend Betsy Pochoda, while she accompanied him in an elevator to the studio of Irving Penn, who was shooting him for the cover of Vanity Fair. “We used to be so pure.” “You’re not getting such good reviews lately,” Penn baited him, fishing for something “interesting” in Roth’s face; at one point he directed his assistant to turn Roth’s collar up. Afterward, back in the elevator, Roth remarked to Pochoda, “You’re in charge of making sure that the shot with my collar up does not appear.” He drew the line at a Playboy interview and also canceled a feature article in People (“temporary madness”) before reconsidering at his publisher’s request. “Portnoy’s Creator Would Like It Known,” read the People subhead, “His Books Are Novels, Not Confessionals”; Roth “stiffens visibly” when asked about personal matters, noted the People reporter, who then enumerated a few (“his unhappy early marriage,” etc.) that Roth had chosen not to discuss.
THE ANATOMY LESSON had given Roth fits, and its fairly brutal reception was even more demoralizing after he’d done his little-all to flog it. By publication day, in early November, he’d seen enough: “I’ll be glad to be getting out of here,” he wrote Tumin. “I don’t mind having to write the fucking books, but I’ll be God damned if I’m going to stand here being insulted.” One friend and steady reader had assured him that he liked The Anatomy Lesson, and when Roth heard that this same friend had belittled the book behind his back, he treated him to a particularly blistering phone call, then took a full three years to apologize: “Say whatever the hell you want to say about my books,” he finally wrote the man, “—it’s not Czechoslovakia.”
“Best of luck,” a well-wisher had remarked to Roth, “and I hope you get Michiko Kakutani instead of Chris Lehmann-Haupt.” Kakutani would go on to review many Roth books for The New York Times, but for now he was back in the hands of the reliably ambivalent Lehmann-Haupt, who began his review by applauding Roth’s “rich, satisfyingly complex conclusion to his Zuckerman trilogy” but was behooved, at last, to condemn the hero’s “endless self-absorption and scab-picking.” The latter view would prove all but unanimous. Zeroing in on the Howe/Appel subplot, Commentary enlisted a stalwart hit man, Joseph Epstein, to bash the novel as “a roman of clay. . . . A character who is having love affairs with four women and wishes to get his own back at a literary critic—this is not . . . exactly a figure of universal significance.” Even Updike, in The New Yorker, was unable to sustain a somewhat strained enthusiasm for Roth’s ever increasing “expertness” in handling “by now highly polished themes,” admitting that The Anatomy Lesson was “the least successful” of the trilogy: “Zuckerman’s babyish reduction of all women to mere suppliers eclipses much of Roth’s engaging characterization of the mistresses, who are each set before us never to appear again.” This, coming from Updike, had to hurt.
In The Anatomy Lesson, Roth described a phenomenon with which he would become even more intimately familiar in the years ahead: “The job was to give pain its due while at the same time rendering accurately the devastation it wreaks upon reason, dignity, pride, maturity, independence—upon all of one’s human credentials.” That Zuckerman supports his aching neck with a thesaurus his father gave him as a boy (“From Dad—you have my every confidence”) would suggest the pain is “felt at a distance from its source,” as the book’s epigraph from the Textbook of Orthopedic Medicine would have it, and never mind the hero’s impotence as a writer ever since his father, on his deathbed, called him a bastard. But then, such an explanation is too pat for a writer of Zuckerman’s subtlety, and he wonders whether he’s actually being tortured by the terrible, life-denying requirements of his vocation per se. Martin Amis’s quip about Roth’s morbid reflexiveness—reduced to writing an “autobiographical novel about what it’s like to write autobiographical novels”—applies far more to The Anatomy Lesson than its predecessor. Zuckerman wishes he could write about someone who really suffers, like his Polish lover, Jaga—“the world of massive historical pain instead of this pain in the neck”—but realizes he could hardly be a writer at all without the subject of his own “semi-comical” suffering, such as it is. “My life as cud, that’s what I’m running out on,” he tells a doctor friend, explaining why he wants to go to medical school both as relief and atonement. “Swallow as experience, then up from the gut for a second go as art. . . . too much inward-dwelling, Bob, too much burrowing back.”
But why atone for what he’d coughed up from his gut? “If he agreed with the Appels and their admonitions, he wouldn’t have written those books in the first place.” Zuckerman likes to believe he’s squeezed the Nice Jewish Boy out of himself drop by drop, while at bottom he’s almost as apt to appease his detractors as revolt against them (a dialectic that also defined his high-minded, impious creator): “Zuckerman is all too conscious of what he’s up to, as M.D. and as porno king,” Roth explained to Updike: “willed extremism at either end of the moral spectrum. My theme, son.” Disgusted, on one level, by his penitent journey to Chicago and (maybe) medical school, Zuckerman adopts the identity of his sternest critic and turns him into the zany, debauched publisher of Lickety Split (“Je m’appelle Appel”), whose aria of obscenity ends only when he cracks his jaw against a gravestone. (Roth was thinking of another reproachful elder, Rabbi Rackman, who’d demanded of the Anti-Defamation League, “What is being done to silence this man?” “And that’s why I broke Zuckerman’s jaw,” said Roth. “I did it for the rabbi.”) Gagged at last, Zuckerman gets outside of himself long enough to focus on the suffering of others—a woman at the hospital, for instance, whose face is half-eaten by cancer:
There was a hole in her cheek the size of a quarter. Through it Zuckerman could see her tongue as it nervously skittered about inside her mouth. The jawbone itself was partially exposed, an inch of it as white and clean as enamel tile. The rest, up to the eye socket, was a chunk of raw flesh, something off the butcher’s floor to cut up for the cat. He tried not to inhale the smell. . . . This is life. With real teeth in it.
Roth liked this ending so much that he again discarded/tabled a previous ending, set in Prague, which he’d always envisaged as the proper conclusion to Zuckerman’s education in “the unforeseen consequences of art.” The first three books had examined the writer’s life in a land where “everything goes and nothing matters,” a phrase Roth invoked in The Paris Review as having defined every aspect of his own career. Asked about his influence on “the culture,” Roth replied it was roughly what it would have been if he’d followed his original plan to be a lawyer: “In an enormous commercial society that demands complete freedom of expression, the culture is a maw.” He moreover insisted that he was content to have it so, rather than embrace the alternative evoked in The Prague Orgy—his novella-length epilogue, published in Zuckerman Bound, that was meant to serve as “a lamp that shined backwards”: from Czechoslovakia, where writers who aspire to cultural relevance are grievously punished—banned, jailed, exiled, forced into menial jobs—while, in the West, Zuckerman is “profusely” and “bizarrely” rewarded for writing a dirty book.
Thus Zuckerman’s “dwarf drama” is put into final perspective—a matter made even more explicit in the screen version of The Prague Orgy that Roth was soon to write, wherein the Klíma/Kundera composite, Bolotka, mocks Zuckerman for his sheepish wish to make amends: “So why are you here? To play a ‘worthwhile’ role? To do a little, tiny penance for being spared the twentieth century?” At the museum where he works as a janitor, Bolotka leads the American into a storage room and invites him to swap clothing. “Now I will be the free man with a troubled conscience,” Bolotka giddily declares, once Zuckerman is wearing the man’s overalls. Meanwhile the regime rewards only such hacks as the culture minister, Novak, who’s aghast to learn that his favorite American book, Betsy MacDonald’s The Egg and I, has been all but forgotten in the decadent West. Again the vast disparity between the two worlds lends itself to cinematic treatment: Zuckerman returns to the “dense, enormous” freedom of New York—shown with a helicopter shot along the Hudson—while in voice-over “NOVAK describes small, imprisoned Czechoslovakia,” where only philistines like himself may thrive: “people who know how to submit decently to their historical misfortune! These are the people to whom we owe the survival of our beloved land, and not to alienated, degenerate, egomaniacal artistes!”‡
When Zuckerman Bound was published in May 1985, Roth prepared to lie low in Connecticut and thus avoid the “ritual slaughter” of the reviews, while allowing himself to hope that the “thematic architecture” of the novels would become more apparent once they were published in a single volume—a hope amply rewarded by Harold Bloom’s definitive front-page rave in the Times Book Review: “Zuckerman Bound merits something reasonably close to the highest level of esthetic praise for tragicomedy, partly because as a formal totality it becomes much more than the sum of its parts,” the Yale mandarin wrote. “Roth has earned a permanent place in American literature by a comic genius that need never be doubted again, wherever it chooses to take him next.” Roth was becoming harder for the cultural maw to devour.
EVER SINCE FINISHING his trilogy and epilogue, Roth had felt a growing desire to “sink [his] teeth into something new and BIG,” though months passed while he did little more than stare at his Selectric. When Bloom was invited to perform at the Jerusalem Festival in late May 1984, Roth was eager for a change of scenery, even if it meant playing Stage Door Johnny again. Ever the dutiful student, he asked a knowledgeable friend to recommend books about modern Israel and Zionism generally.
They stayed at Mishkenot Sha’ananim (“Peaceful Dwellings”), a row of guesthouses provided by the city for visiting academics and artists, just outside the walls of Old Jerusalem. It was Roth’s first trip to Israel since the summer of 1963, and he looked up old friends such as Amos Elon, the prominent left-wing journalist who wrote for Haaretz and The New York Review of Books. Through Elon he met luminaries like Shimon Peres, soon to be prime minister, whom Roth liked but was advised, by Elon, not to trust (“I don’t have to trust or not trust anyone,” Roth wrote Malamud, “—I just mostly listen”). Roth also gave an interview to the Mishkenot Sha’ananim Newsletter, as a courtesy to his hosts, though he’d declined to meet with other members of the Israeli press. “He has been called the Woody Allen of words and the Meyer Lansky of Jewish culture,” Idith Zertal introduced him to newsletter readers. “He is said to be ready to sell his heritage for a few laughs. . . . This man, whose most intimate habits, whose darkest fancies, are supposedly familiar to millions of people, has become one of the most private public figures in the United States.” Zertal seemed determined to make the most of things, though her peculiar truculence seemed almost to have a mellowing effect on Roth. “That goy?” she said, when Roth mentioned Updike in passing. “I mean Updike, the American writer,” he replied. “He’s one of my contemporaries and I’m very interested in what he does too.”
Roth detected a kind of “pressure” in Jerusalem that he hadn’t felt since Prague, and was eager to learn more. Equipped with “a list a yard long of people to look up,” he returned a few months later with David Plante, whom he introduced as Claire Bloom at a pompous party. Privately he told his friend (“just between you and your diary”) that he needed to know what a gentile like Plante made of things: Roth had started a novel with a (provisionally) gentile character, and he wanted this character to meet a few narrow-minded Israeli “fanatics” on the right, the ones who wanted to annex the West Bank through violent means, if necessary, versus the “fair minded, intelligent, humanist, cultured” liberals whom Roth already knew in sufficient number.
The next day Roth informed Plante that they’d have to pay extra for a taxi because of the danger involved in driving to Ofra, a West Bank settlement whose Arab residents had been known to stone cars and the Jews inside them. Roth had arranged to meet Israel Harel, a settlement leader who glibly insisted the occupiers enjoyed good relations with the local Arabs. “All Philip said in reaction, again and again,” Plante noted, “was, ‘Ah-hun, ah-hun.’ ” Afterward Harel and an American woman showed the two writers around the settlement: the kindergarten, print shop, and a group of older students sitting around a table. Referring to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria—lands rightfully belonging to Israel, according to the Bible—a brash young man asked Roth what he thought of the settlements. Roth smiled: “I have to tell you that everything that has to do with this country is peripheral to my real interests. I’m here because I’m curious.” A couple of days later, he met an even more invaluable “treasure,” the right-wing lawyer Elyakim Haetzni, who packed a revolver while driving Roth around the Arab city of Hebron and the huge Jewish settlement of Kiryat Abba; Haetzni’s colorful pontifications would be reproduced at length in The Counterlife, where he appears as the aptly named Lippman. That night Roth and Plante had dinner chez Amos Elon. A staunch advocate of Palestinian statehood and total withdrawal from the occupied territories, Elon became furious when Plante remarked that he’d been “impressed” by Harel: “He told me it was as if I had been impressed by Himmler,” Plante wrote in his diary. “Israel Harel was a criminal. He was the chairman of a movement that shot off the kneecaps of Arab leaders, threw bombs into bus loads of innocent Arab children, wanted to dispossess Arabs of their land and homes.” Plante got the impression Elon’s anger was really directed at Roth, whom he sternly lectured, alone, in a separate room after dinner.
Israel had changed since the wars of 1967 and 1973. “It wasn’t Israel as California anymore,” said Roth. “It was Israel as the Middle East, and all that people could talk about was politics.” At the heart of the debate were the compromises of nationalism—the violence and injustice involved in countering enemies on all sides, and within, which seemed essential to the maintenance of the Jewish state even as it bristled against the Jewish conscience, not to say the world’s, what with its readiness to condemn Jewish moral imperfection. “I was getting it from all sides in Israel,” said Roth, “which was the best thing that could have happened.”
When he returned to Israel yet again in February 1985, he spent much of his time with the novelist Aharon Appelfeld—a small, bald, round-faced man with “the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard,” as Roth put it; the two had met at a London literary party a few years before, and liked each other immediately. Appelfeld’s harrowing childhood in the midst of the Holocaust, Roth liked to say, could scarcely have been more at odds with his own sheltered idyll in Weequahic. Appelfeld’s mother had been murdered by the Romanian army in 1941, when Aharon was eight, and eventually the boy escaped from a concentration camp in Transnistria and spent three years on the run—hiding in the woods, working as a shepherd, all the while concealing his Jewishness; finally he joined the Soviet army as a cook, and subsequently immigrated to Palestine. Roth would spend hours discussing “the sum of all these Jewish antinomies” with the author of Badenheim 1939, either at a pleasant café where Appelfeld went each day to write, the Ticho House, or during long walks all over Jerusalem.
Once again Roth had found a place where “everything matters,” and suddenly “the bits and pieces of crap” he’d managed to write over the past year began, he said, “to flash signals and to arrange themselves in little constellations and I think I may be on the brink of an idea that won’t bore me.” He began to think of Israel and England as counterimages—the West Bank and Gloucestershire, Jerusalem and London—with opposing notions of Jewish assertiveness and self-hatred. Appelfeld had much to say about the latter, “an ancient Jewish ailment which in modern times has taken on various guises,” as he remarked in a New York Times interview with Roth: “I grew up with the feeling that anything Jewish was blemished. From my earliest childhood my gaze was directed at the beauty of non-Jews. They were blond and tall and behaved naturally.” Roundly accused of self-hatred for much of his career, Roth had witnessed the phenomenon at close range in London—embodied most vividly by his “Good Fairy,” as Idith Zertal had described Bloom during the couple’s first and last trip to Israel together. Exposed to an alarming mass of Jews at a bus station in Jerusalem, Bloom had been moved to comment on their “hideous faces.” As Roth remembered: “ ‘If we were in Italy, if we were in Greece,’ she told me, ‘the people are beautiful there!’ I promised then to take her to the swarming bus stations of Naples and Genoa and Athens and Salonika, where she could gaze undisturbed upon all the undisgusting faces jamming those Italian and Greek buses.” The “nasty, hateful scene” ended with Bloom in tears: “Don’t you see—it’s a sickness,” she sobbed.
Hitherto Roth had been somewhat stymied in his attempts to write about England, since, as he put it, he didn’t hate anything there: “a writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see.” Now, almost everywhere he looked, he saw evidence of English anti-Semitism. He’d almost forgotten an incident several years ago, during his trip abroad with Ann Mudge, when a dowager at the Connaught had been so affronted by the sight of a lovely blonde woman dining with a Jew that she’d loudly complained about the “stink” while glaring in Roth’s direction. He was reminded of this, dining with Bloom, when he heard a woman regale her companion (and indirectly Roth) about “a disgusting little Jew” who’d sold her a ring and “naturally” cheated her; she kept repeating the words “little Jew” until (over Bloom’s mortified protests) Roth approached her table and called her a scumbag. In the hope of provoking such people all the more, he grew a beard that augmented his already conspicuously Semitic features§—and sure enough, as he remarked to Julian Mitchell, when he went to the loo at the Royal Automobile Club nowadays, he sensed the scrutiny of fellow members who looked to see whether he was circumcised (“this may have been a joke,” said Mitchell, “but I don’t think it was”).
Back in 1970, Roth had written Mitchell that his agonies over what would eventually become My Life as a Man had forced him into “being ‘experimental,’ which is only to say that I don’t know where I am, and am so sick of fiction, and every fifty pages see through the fictional disguises, and so drop what I’m doing and start out a new way . . . and so I’ve decided that that’s my book, those fifty pages of transparency piled atop one another. A grim business.” The process had resolved itself in his using only the two notional beginnings—“Salad Days” and “Courting Disaster”—before getting on with his hero’s “True Story”; now, in the early stages of The Counterlife, he found himself again writing a series of “false starts” that suddenly began to cohere like filings to a magnet. “I wrote one section and then I thought, ‘What if the opposite happened?’ ”—and one such opposite was a chance to kill off Zuckerman: a nice way to silence critics who said he always wrote about his own experience (“Now I only hope I don’t kick off before the book comes out,” he told the Times, “—otherwise the wisdom will be that I based Zuckerman’s funeral on my own”). When Susan Sontag later congratulated him on the “meta-narrative” of The Counterlife, Roth assured her he had no such aesthetic theory in mind, but rather was simply receptive to “the authority of dreams, in which characters who appear to be the same, are at least called XYZ in one dream after another, turn up dead and then alive and then turn out to be ‘oneself,’ etc.” He was, in short, trusting his confusion—a directive that would stand him in good stead as his work continued to evolve in startling ways.
IN AUGUST 1982, shortly after his own diagnosis of heart disease, Roth had visited Malamud while the man was recuperating from a stroke and bypass surgery: “Real to me now,” Roth wrote in his notes. “Looks weak and vulnerable. Listing a little to one side.” However diminished, Malamud impressed Roth with his determination to get on with his work, though he could hardly read at the time. “You have written wonderful books and you have been a kind, brave, and generous colleague—even when vexed,” Roth wrote him afterward, with seeming contrition.
What had vexed Malamud foremost was Roth’s essay “Imagining Jews,” in the September 29, 1974, issue of The New York Review of Books, which had compared Roth’s own work with that of his eminent Jewish rivals, Bellow and Malamud—the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of American letters, as Bellow wryly dubbed the three of them. Roth admired Malamud and felt the usual filial stirrings (albeit faintly at times), but Bellow was his idol and would later become a good friend as well, a preference grounded in both personal and aesthetic affinity. Back in 1966, during his WNET interview with Jerre Mangione, Roth had commended Bellow for “knock[ing] off the reverence and piety” so common among Jewish writers of the time—and later, in 1999, a taped discussion between Bellow and Roth made it clear whose piety they found especially grating. “And Malamud,” Roth remarked, “the great appeal Malamud had was he had the gentle, broken Jews.”
BELLOW: Shtetl schtick adapted to the U.S.A.
ROTH: That’s right, with all the sentimental baggage that comes with it. . . . And [Irving] Howe, who I loathed. . . .
BELLOW: He was a jerk.
ROTH: He was a big liar, and he’s Saint Irving.
Roth’s remarks capture something of the spirit that went into “Imagining Jews”; conceived as a rebuttal to Howe’s exhaustive attack on Roth’s work and Portnoy in particular, the essay took a long and sometimes invidious excursion through the oeuvres of Hart and Schaffner. Roth noted that, in Bellow’s work, “almost invariably his heroes are Jewish in vivid and emphatic ways when they are actors in dramas of conscience”—e.g., the protagonist of The Victim, Asa Leventhal, who feels a morbid sense of responsibility for the parasitic Allbee. In Henderson the Rain King, however, the “hoggish and greedy hero” is a kind of anti-Jew who expresses his voracious appetites with the simple phrase “I want!” “In a Bellow novel,” said Roth, “only a goy can talk like that and get away with it.”
Roth then argued that the same tendencies are so schematic in Malamud’s work that it amounts to a kind of “moral allegory” in which “the Jew is innocent, passive, virtuous,” whereas the gentile is “corrupt, violent, and lustful.” Roth cited The Assistant as a typical product of Malamud’s “essentially folkloric and didactic” imagination—thus the suffering but decent Jewish grocer, Morris Bober, helps his Italian assistant, Frank Alpine, find redemption despite the man’s many transgressions. Such remarks were liable to vex Malamud, to be sure, but he would take sterner exception to what Roth had to say about his novel The Fixer (“I have never admired your work more,” Roth had written him in 1966, after reading galleys, “and I have admired it plenty”). Based on an actual episode in czarist Russia, the innocent, passive Jew in this case is Bok, who is jailed and tortured on suspicion of murdering a Christian boy during Passover; Malamud’s Jew suffers so luridly (if virtuously) that Roth likened the novel to the work of the Marquis de Sade and “the pseudonymous author of The Story of O.”
Having compared Bellow and Malamud to the latter’s disadvantage, Roth went on to suggest that he himself had transcended, with Portnoy, the outworn notion of the Jew as an “alienated, hypersensitive Victim.” Roth’s sense of his own place in the scheme of things was the same as Zuckerman’s in The Ghost Writer: “when I came upon Babel’s description of the Jewish writer as a man with autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose, I had been inspired to add, ‘and blood in his penis,’ and had then recorded the words like a challenge—a flaming Dedalian formula to ignite my soul’s smithy.” Unlike Bellow, and certainly unlike Malamud, Roth didn’t feel obliged to make his lustful hero a goy, even though his portrait of a “Jew as sexual defiler” had brought the likes of Howe and Podhoretz roaring out of the woodwork, and never mind Marie Syrkin, who’d lumped him with Goebbels and Streicher. “Had she not been constrained by limitations of space,” Roth wrote of the angry Zionist’s letter to Commentary, “Syrkin might eventually have had me in the dock with the entire roster of Nuremberg defenders.”
“I was highly entertained by your piece in the New York Review,” wrote Bellow, who’d once groused about a general perception of himself as “a Bad Guy Jew” versus Malamud’s “Good Guy Jew.” “I didn’t quite agree—that’s too much to expect—but I shall slowly think over what you said.” Roth was gratified and said so; meanwhile he warned Malamud about the piece: “I don’t know what you’ll make of my approach, but hope that in the long run (not to mention the short) it will add to our consciousness of what we’ve been writing and are yet to write.” In a controversial tribute he would publish a few weeks after Malamud’s death, Roth characterized his colleague’s subsequent note as having consisted of a single “terse and colloquial” sentence: What Roth had written in “Imagining Jews,” said Malamud, “is your problem, not mine.”
In fact, Malamud had considered saying more, and had carefully set aside previous drafts of his letter for posterity. “I wish I could say Roth is looking after his friend Malamud but I can’t,” the first draft began. Striking out a too-magnanimous bit about Roth’s “brilliance of polemic,” Malamud noted “errors of omission and commission, oversimplification, and distortion,” concluding: “As they say, ‘who needs enemies’ if they have such friends.” In another draft, he tried to be more definite about Roth’s errors, pointing out that certain details of torture in The Fixer, for instance, came from research on the real-life case of Menahem Mendel Beilis: “If I make the scene of their torture violent I do so as an artist. To say I do it as a pornographer or sadist diminishes you in the eyes of anyone who reads and understands the book.” On final reflection, however, the scrupulous man decided he didn’t owe Roth such a measured response, hence the note he actually mailed: “When a man who can read, so badly misinterprets another writer’s work and motives in justification of his own, he has a problem. I now seriously doubt that you can discuss me or my work with complete honesty. That’s your problem.”
Not a further word passed between the two for almost four years—until a night in London, when the Malamuds came to Fawcett Street for a conciliatory dinner. As Roth wrote in his posthumous tribute, he gave Ann Malamud a welcoming buss at the door, then “plunged” toward her husband with outstretched hand: “In our eagerness to be the first to forgive—or perhaps to be forgiven—we wound up overshooting the handshake and kissing on the lips, rather like the poor baker Lieb and the even less fortunate Kobotsky at the conclusion of ‘The Loan.’ ”¶
Their final meeting, on July 10, 1985, was less successful. Roth and Bloom drove up to Bennington for lunch, and Roth found his friend “a frail and very sick old man, his tenacity used up.” Still, Malamud had managed to start a new novel, and after lunch he offered to read a few chapters aloud to his guests. “Listening to what he read,” Roth wrote, “was like being led into a dark hole to see by torchlight the first Malamud story ever scratched upon a cave wall.” When the reading was over, Roth ventured to say that it seemed to open slowly, and wondered where the story was heading. “What’s next isn’t the point,” said Malamud, quietly furious. Afterward Roth asked Bloom whether he’d been too harsh, and Bloom assured him he had; Roth could only answer, as ever, that he was compelled to be honest when a fellow writer asked his opinion.
Malamud died of a heart attack eight months later, and Roth promptly phoned the editor of The New York Times Book Review, Mitchel Levitas, asking if he could write a commemorative piece. Given a tight deadline, Roth reread five of Malamud’s books in a week, then produced a sometimes touching but starkly candid eulogy tracing their friendship from that not very auspicious meeting in Oregon (when Malamud had walked into the closet) to that final dreary lunch in Bennington. “Was much moved by your piece on Malamud in the Times,” Bellow wrote. “You saw him at first as an insurance agent.” (This referred to Roth’s impression of the prosaic man on meeting him in Oregon.) “I privately thought of him as a CPA. But I have a secret weakness for the hidden dimensions of agents and CPAs.” Meanwhile, in his diary, Alfred Kazin noted something a little gleeful and nasty about the piece—that it reflected Roth’s “bouncy sense of his own success, his constant keeping of the score on other novelists (especially Joosh [Jewish] ones), turned Malamud the sage father etc. into the ragged failure.”
Certainly that was the widow’s opinion. “Bern would have found your article humiliating,” she explained to Roth, since he’d asked; “if you cannot understand that, it is pointless for me to explain why. I must add that I am one of many who reacted with anger.” With perhaps understandable chagrin, Roth asked her whether she believed he’d deliberately set out to humiliate her husband, “or whether you think I did it out of blind stupidity, wholly unaware of what I was saying. Does either really make sense to you?” He pointed out that “numerous” intelligent and sensitive people (Bellow, after all) “expressed a rather different reaction.”
Some twenty-five years later, Roth wrote a heartfelt endorsement of Malamud’s Library of America edition: “To me, as a young writer of the next generation starting out in the 1950s—and trying to lay claim to my own Jewish material—his fiction, along with Bellow’s, meant the world.” To that other writer who meant the world, however, Roth complained not only that Malamud had been too pious, but also that he’d “surrounded himself by real dopes” like a certain Times reviewer: “Now it’s one thing if you entertain him for opportunistic reasons—get him a girl, get him a blowjob, get him a dinner—maybe he’ll give you a good review. But to entertain him for the pleasure of having Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in your house?”