CHAPTER
Thirty-Five
IN AUGUST 1986, GAIA SERVADIO AND HER YOUNG SON, Orlando, visited Roth in Connecticut.* Bloom was in England, but the three of them had a splendid visit; Roth had finished The Counterlife and was perfectly free to show his guests the pastoral beauty of Litchfield County. There was a little awkwardness when Roth kept trying to coax Servadio to bed, while she just as persistently (if politely) declined. As she remembered: “Claire told me very confidentially—as a close friend—that Philip could not make love to anybody because of his heart.” Roth certainly didn’t behave like a man troubled with impotence, and Servadio was (by her own admission) “cavalier” in those days about sleeping with whomsoever she liked, but she was too fond of Philip to embarrass him that way. At any rate, theirs was a fun-loving friendship, and Roth took it breezily in stride. “You fuck everybody!” he’d always joke with her afterward. “You never fucked me!”
A few months earlier—on May 1—he’d found himself sitting beside the actress Ava Gardner at a dinner party for Leonard Bernstein at the American embassy in London. “I never thought it would happen but I’ve finally come to envy Mickey Rooney,” he wrote Bellow the next day, referring to Gardner’s first husband. When Roth had mentioned to her that he was from New Jersey, she said, “I was married to a guy from New Jersey”—meaning her third husband, Frank Sinatra. A friend of Roth, Alan Yentob, was seated on the other side of him, and attests that the sixty-three-year-old Gardner was still stunning: “Philip was just at her the whole time,” he remembered, and Roth agreed the two had hit it off. Toward the end of the evening she scribbled her address and phone number on the back of her place card, and soon he passed a very pleasant afternoon at 34 Ennismore Gardens. Roth was already back in Connecticut when the drunken actress phoned Fawcett Street around three in the morning: “Where is he?” she demanded. “Your friend Ava Gardner called last night,” Bloom coldly informed him, whereupon Roth assured her that Ava was just a friendly acquaintance (“deny deny deny”) and decided on the spot to end things. He never saw Gardner again, and was saddened by her death, from pneumonia, only three and a half years later.
As Bloom would report in Doll’s House, a far more damning episode “came to light” a few years later, when Anna Steiger and her friend Felicity†—a fellow singer and schoolmate—decided it was time to tell Bloom about advances he’d made toward Felicity on two occasions: in 1981 and “more explicitly” in 1988. The first advance allegedly went as follows: one early morning after sleeping over on Fawcett Street, Felicity was about to leave for rehearsals when Roth “suddenly appeared and attempted to French kiss her,” according to Steiger; Felicity pushed him away and departed. Presented with the substance of that earlier charge, Roth called the story “preposterous” and offered his alibi in the form of a “bit of erotic trivia”: “I for one have never found the ‘French kiss’ pleasurable. To go searching around the cavern of a woman’s mouth with a jutting, insinuating tongue was never my idea of fun, not even as an adolescent and certainly not as a man, even one who willingly admits a profound fondness for cunnilingus.” For what it’s worth, a number of Roth’s old lovers were happy to corroborate the point.
Roth also claimed that his relations with Felicity remained “affable” until 1988; indeed, Felicity was the one who fielded the phone call notifying Roth of his National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife, ebulliently greeting him with the news when he came home that night (“Anna remained unmoved and silent in her chair,” he noted). That was on January 12, 1988; Bloom left for a movie shoot in Africa the next day, whereas Roth would leave for Israel on January 16; meanwhile Felicity was staying in Anna’s old rooms on the top floor (Anna lived elsewhere by then), and for a few days she and Roth had the house to themselves.
On the second night, as Roth remembered, he came home from dinner around ten thirty and found Felicity in the first-floor living room. They began to talk. At some point Felicity mentioned that she’d had a passionate love affair with a famous opera basso, a married man with children, during a recent production in which he sang a leading role and she was in the chorus. “How she got from telling me about the circumstances of her growing up to speaking about her erotic adventures I no longer remember,” Roth wrote. “Did I at some point ask her about them? I might well have, it’s not impossible, but I actually think the subject arose spontaneously in the course of her talking freely to me about herself for the first time in all the years we’d known each other.” As Felicity told her friend Anna, however, Roth’s “line of questioning” could hardly have been more pointed (“Do you have many lovers? Are you seeing anyone?”); he’d also inquired about Steiger’s love life, which Felicity declined to discuss.
The matter was on Roth’s mind the following night, when he came home late from a jolly dinner chez Alvarez and encountered Felicity, in her nightgown, descending toward him on the second-floor landing. “Now, maybe she was going for a glass of buttermilk in the kitchen at midnight,” he said, “but it certainly didn’t look that way, particularly after last night’s conversation.” The tipsy Roth made to embrace the young woman, putting a hand on her waist; she recoiled and began shouting that he “was crazy and a monster to do this to [Claire] and that she was going back upstairs to pack her bag and leave”—so he recalled, along with his reply: “I apologize for misreading the situation. I seem to have taken a liberty. I thought an invitation was being extended.” He was getting ready for bed when he heard the downstairs door slam—or, as he subsequently remembered in a 2015 email, he heard the door slam early the next morning, “before [he] even rose for breakfast.” Afterward Felicity left an angry message on Bloom’s machine: she wanted to return and collect the rest of her things, but not while Roth was there. “If I remember correctly,” he wrote, “I left for work but put a note on her bed which said something like, ‘This is pure sexual hysteria.’ ”
Anna Steiger said her friend was “incredibly upset” when she showed up at Anna’s apartment, where she told a somewhat different story. His pass on the stairs, she said, hadn’t bothered her all that much; she’d “simply declined and withdrew,” reminding him that she was a guest in Claire’s home and so on. The next morning she’d hoped to leave without seeing him, but an antic Roth was “awake and already in high gear,” as Steiger put it (paraphrasing her friend). “Morning [Felicity]!” he said, scampering after her on the stairs. “Come on, how long is it since I made a pass at you? Ten years? What were you then, twelve?‡ What’s the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don’t fuck her?” This—not the relatively innocuous business on the stairs—was what rattled and angered the young woman, hence her indignant message on the answering machine. Again, Roth claimed she was already gone by the time he got up that morning, and certainly a side of him would have hesitated to add insult to injury that way. But another side of Roth was the Mickey Sabbath who aspired “[t]o affront and affront and affront till there was no one on earth unaffronted”—indeed, his impulse to mock a certain kind of bourgeois piety was among his most pronounced traits, both as a writer and a man.
As for Felicity’s considered view of the incident, she permitted Steiger to quote her directly: “When the woman in question is the close friend of his stepdaughter and wife,§ the motive for making such a pass would indicate something more complex than simply responding to an ‘inviting smile from an attractive woman.’ . . . Its destructiveness seems clear; all the options were compromising.” Certainly Bloom thought so: in Doll’s House, she finds “intricate, subtle layers of intent” on the part of her former mate, a “Machiavellian strategist” whose moment of lechery on the staircase was part of “an ambitious and foolproof plan”—scrutinized at length in all its byzantine nuance—to punish the three women. “What, aside from a great nation’s decision to go to war, can carry such an amplitude of meaning?” Roth replied, and offered an alternative motive—the same motive, indeed, that he ventured to impute to Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, and Yul Brynner for committing adultery with the younger Bloom: desire. “This is what people are,” Roth wrote. “This is what people do. Adultery does not correspond with anyone’s holiest wishes for what the world should be. Yet there it is. . . . Hate me for what I am, not for what I’m not.”
It bears adding that Roth was rarely penitent with respect to Felicity. The note he left on her bed was more brutal mockery: he was amused, he wrote, by her “performance of virtue defiled,” as were the friends for whom he’d played her angry phone message, and if Claire wasn’t equally amused, when he played it for her, he’d “eat his hat”; he signed off “Kisses, Philip.” After he returned from Israel, he called her up on the pretext of discussing Claire’s mail, which Felicity was supposed to forward, and lightly inquired whether she planned to tell Claire what had happened; it was up to her, he said, since he could “play it either way.” And finally, later, on the odd occasion that he answered the phone when she called for Claire, he’d greet her with “Hi, little home wrecker,” or simply “Felicity who?”
ROTH’S NOMINAL REASON for returning to Israel that January was to interview Appelfeld, whose newly translated The Immortal Bartfuss was about to be published in America; as luck would have it, Roth’s arrival also coincided with the war crimes trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian auto worker from Cleveland whom some had identified as a notoriously sadistic guard at Treblinka, “Ivan the Terrible.” Roth saw in the newspaper that the trial was open to the public and took to attending each morning, listening to the harrowing testimony—translated from Polish, Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew—and carefully watching Demjanjuk’s face. “You’re a liar!” the defendant bellowed at one point, and Roth turned to Avishai and said, “That’s the tell.” An innocent man, he said, would not so theatrically call a death-camp survivor a liar.
Meanwhile the Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifada had just erupted in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Avishai was friends with the future prime minister Ehud Olmert, then a backbencher for the right-wing Likud party, and he arranged for Roth and Olmert to meet over lunch at the Knesset. Roth deplored the Israeli policy of violence against the rioters, many of them children, and wondered how Israelis hoped to cling to territories with such large and unruly Arab populations. Olmert countered by blaming the revolt in part on the failure of “inauthentic” American Jews to come over as settlers. “Are you crazy?” said Roth. “American Jews aren’t coming.” Olmert seemed surprised and asked why. “Because they have lives of their own! There is a Zion, and it’s called America.” As Avishai remembered, the lunch “quickly degenerated into raised voices and hurried departures,” though years later a more pacifist Olmert admitted the argument had changed his thinking on the issue: “If a good Jew like Roth felt this way,” he said, “then what could be expected of the others?”
A more heated argument ensued over dinner with the Tumins, at Lahiere’s restaurant in Princeton, a few days after Roth’s return to the States. Mel was passionately concerned with Jewish survival, and he infuriated Roth by loudly defending Israel’s vicious reprisals against the Palestinians. Roth scribbled notes (some of them illegible) immediately afterward:
. . . Beatings? [Mel:] Bad but another country would do even worse.
I say the Palestinians should consider themselves lucky.
[Mel:] “Right! Compare to Syria, compare to Jordan!”
. . . The Israel myth. “Better” than other states. (Syria and Jordan) Better than France? Holland? Canada? Australia? Why can’t it just be the same . . . a democracy like any other . . .
Auschwitz—therefore justified.
Mel: they ought to all get out before the catastrophe occurs. Come and resettle in America. . . . We can’t afford to lose Jews again.
Mel’s notion of a kind of patriotic, reverse Zionism (“Come and resettle in America”)—the opposite of Olmert’s solution—would stick in Roth’s mind, all the more as he became aware of his own considerable ambivalence. In Israel he’d befriended Emma Playfair, an English lawyer for the Palestinian human-rights organization Al-Haq, and when she came to New York he arranged a dinner for her to meet various literary people. “I never heard my friends before engage in such anti-Israeli hatred as they displayed that night in Emma’s presence,” he remembered. “She was the catalyst, though she was by no means a hater herself. I practiced old dependable detached observation, though I was boiling within.” One friend gloatingly observed that Israel had been “revealed,” while another wondered, “Who needs a European country in the region anyway?”—as if to challenge, à la Arafat, Israel’s very right to exist. To make matters worse, these “bourgeois-bohemians” (Roth) ended up sticking him with a four-hundred-dollar check. “What is going to happen in Israel?” he wrote Updike in March. “READ MY NEXT NOVEL AND FIND OUT.”
HERMAN ROTH HAD spent much of that first summer after his wife’s death (1981) lurking around Philip’s house in Connecticut, at loose ends; when he could muster the energy, he’d go outside and rake leaves. One day he linked arms with a visitor, David Plante, and led him down to the pool. “Are you married, Dave?” he asked. Plante said he wasn’t, and offered condolences about Bess. “A wonderful woman,” said Herman, “a really wonderful woman, Dave,” and his face crumpled with tears.
That winter he shared a condo in Bal Harbour, just north of Miami Beach, with a fellow widower and old Bradley Beach co-lodger, Bill Weber. His remarkable rejuvenation was due in part, Roth thought, to Weber’s being “a fairly good stand-in for my mother—a good-natured, even-tempered, untroublesome partner whose faults and failings he could correct unceasingly.” As for Herman’s son, he was now an eminent novelist in midjourney, barely perturbed anymore by his father’s hocking and gaucherie; on the contrary he loved hanging around with Herman and other “lucky survivors” gathered in Florida (“Either you’re dead or you’re there”), laughing at their jokes and returning their tenderness. “Spent an evening in the lobby of Meyer Lansky’s hotel, The Singapore, with the last of Newark’s Jewish population,” he wrote a friend. “Old men I’d known as young men when I was a little boy. Strange to think of the anger it once took to free myself from their embrace. Now you could knock them over with a feather.”
Roth reported to Mildred Martin that Herman had become “a great lively favorite with the widows” in Florida (“It’s inspiring and admirable”), and after that first winter Herman was pretty much his old self again: railing at Reagan, phoning nephews and nieces and grandchildren with advice, writing letters to newspapers, and “monitoring the caloric intake” of his new girlfriend, Lillian Beloff, a plumpish, stoical widow eighteen years his junior. (“Always tell them you’re ten years older than you are,” Herman advised, “so if you say you’re ninety, they say ‘You look great!’—whereas, if you tell them you’re eighty, they’re like, ‘Eh, he looks eighty.’ ”) Herman had met Lillian while he was sitting at his back window one day and caught her pulling into Dr. Horowitz’s parking space. “Hey!” he called. “You’re in Dr. Horowitz’s slot!” Then: “You’re a good-looking woman. What’s your name?” As it happened, Herman knew all about her: her late husband’s father (“You were married to Soand-so, weren’t you?”) had run a stationery store on Central Avenue in downtown Newark; she worked at an auto supply place run by an old boyhood pal of Philip, Lenny Lonoff, whose family used to live right across the street from the Roths in Weequahic, etc. “She was dumbstruck,” said Philip.
So it went for the next five or six years. Herman and Lillian had just arrived in West Palm Beach for the winter months of 1987–88, when he awoke one morning to find that the right side of his face “had gone slack and lifeless as though the bone had been filleted,” Roth wrote in Patrimony. At first Herman thought he’d had a stroke—his “worst fear” given what he remembered of his own father’s paralysis and slow death—but a subsequent MRI revealed a massive tumor that would prove to consist of cartilaginous material (“a little like your fingernail”), which, though not malignant, would in time become large enough to kill him.
Meanwhile—because the MRI alone couldn’t determine the nature of the tumor—Herman endured a painful biopsy, in June 1988, that entailed getting a hole punched in his upper palate so the doctor could extract a sample of tumor tissue. During the two-hour drive to Connecticut afterward, Philip stopped at a restaurant and got a bag full of ice cubes, and by the time they got home Herman’s shirt was soaked from the ice he’d sucked with his aching, half-paralyzed mouth. Father and son entered the house through the kitchen door and Bloom, standing there at the stove, “threw her hands up to her face in horror, began to scream, and ran out of the house,” as Roth remembered. He steered his bewildered father upstairs and got him settled into the guest bedroom, then went looking for Bloom—whom he found, at last, “cowering beside the woods about a third of a mile from the house. . . . I said something like, ‘He’s sick. He’s been in the hospital. He’s dying. He’s eighty-six and he’s in hell. What do you expect him to look like? . . . Do you think I liked handling your mother’s corpse?’ ”
Roth elided the episode in Patrimony, where he was careful to emphasize Bloom’s good works—the way she’d prepared a big pot of vegetable soup for Herman and cut flowers for his room. The next day Herman felt well enough, at first, to sit down for lunch with Philip, Claire, and their visitors—Sandy’s son Seth and his wife, Ruth—but Herman kept leaving the table at intervals; when it occurred to Philip, over coffee, that his father hadn’t returned in a while, he went looking for him. “I smelled the shit halfway up the stairs to the second floor,” he wrote in Patrimony. The anesthetic had painfully constipated his father, who’d tried and tried to defecate at various service stations on the way home from the hospital; now Roth found him standing naked in an upstairs bathroom, dripping wet from the shower. “I beshat myself,” he said forlornly. While undressing, Herman had “managed to spread the shit over everything,” and Philip helped him back into the shower and then wrapped him up in a clean bathrobe and put him to bed. Many readers of Patrimony would protest Roth’s inclusion of the whole mortifying episode, but caring for his father so intimately, scrubbing up the ubiquitous shit (on his toothbrush, in his hair), had been a kind of holy experience—“one of the most extraordinary and wonderful things that’s ever happened to me,” he wrote Updike at the time. Afterward, Roth took Bloom aside and explained what had happened. “With undisguised loathing,” he later recounted, “she said, ‘Why can’t he learn to control himself?’ ”
Roth didn’t plan to publish Patrimony until after Herman’s death, and never told his father he’d been taking notes as long ago as Bess’s funeral. (“What kind of people are we?” Plante remarked back then. “We don’t even stop taking notes at a funeral.”) As Roth explained in 1993, “I imagined that somewhere down the line, it would be useful to know what it was like to watch someone you love die.” He finished a partial “final draft” in January 1989; then, after his father’s death nine months later, he wrote the last chapter, ending with an elegiac dream he’d had the previous summer, in which he stood on a Newark pier some fifty years ago, watching a “defunct warship driving blindly into shore”—a “plaintive metaphor” for his father that his “wide-awake mind” would never have condoned: “Rather, it was sleep that, in its wisdom, kindly delivered up to me this childishly simple vision so rich with truth and crystallized my own pain so aptly in the figure of a small, fatherless evacuee on the Newark docks, as stunned and bereft as the entire nation had once been at the passing of a heroic president.”
ROTH WROTE no fiction for almost two years after finishing The Counterlife, and sometimes wondered whether he’d ever write fiction again. In the midst of his pain problems and Halcion depression, the best he could do in the way of narrative was to “retrace the steps” of his own life—beginning with a few sketches about Bucknell and other early memories. “I’m tired of the make-up and the false whiskers and the wig,” he wrote, “tired of putting the stuff on and taking it off and putting it on again. Autobiography is another kind of mask, of course, but it’s a change.” By the spring of 1987 he’d managed to produce fifty or sixty pages, and one day, in his usual funk, he began reading them aloud to Avishai—then, after an hour or so, he suddenly snapped the folder shut: “Oh well, this is boring.”
But it served a purpose. While reading to Avishai, his low spirits lifted ever so slightly when he came to a line addressed to Maggie’s corpse—“You’re dead and I didn’t have to do it”—which he repeated at least three times with dawning gratification. “I think what may lay behind the writing is the desire to make peace with a lot of old turmoil,” he wrote Miss Martin.
Also, an obsessive preoccupation with mortality. I’ve lived two-thirds of my life, maybe even more. I’ve done a lot of work. I’ve written and published what I think is not only my best book [Counterlife], but perhaps the best book I’ll ever be able to write. Claire and I are clearly together for the rest of our lives. I’ve had no children and won’t. My father is 85 and can’t live much longer, despite his relatively good health. My mother is irrevocably gone, by which I mean that I don’t really talk to her ghost any more, though I do miss her and love her, perhaps somewhat the way I did as a boy. Time is real, and so is one’s history.
That prediction about his “best book” was arguably mistaken, and certainly the one about Bloom—indeed, he would do well to make peace with “old turmoil” given the fresh kind that lay ahead.
Still, when he’d finished what he alternately titled A Countertale, Portrait of the Artist as a Young American, Raw Life: The Education of Philip Roth—to name a few—he sensed the whole performance was flat and even a little disingenuous. “Protecting virtually everyone except Maggie and yourself,” he wrote in his notes, “and even yourself.” Then: “Assault your own book!” Roth’s skepticism about his objectivity had been helped along by an early reader, Paul Fussell, who wryly suggested he change the subtitle from “A Novelist’s Autobiography” to “An Autobiographer’s Novel”—hence what most readers would agree was the best (or most artful) part of the finished book: Zuckerman’s damning critique at the end, beginning with the advice, “Don’t publish—you are far better off writing about me than ‘accurately’ reporting your own life.” Roth, on the one hand, called Zuckerman his Charlie McCarthy, and pointed out that “the dummy is always smarter than the ventriloquist”; certainly the dummy was right to wonder, in this case, how the idyllic childhood portrayed in The Facts could have possibly “nurtured the author of Portnoy’s Complaint.” On the other hand, Roth would also claim—in the same interview where he called Zuckerman his Charlie McCarthy—that his alter ego is “wrong. . . . I think the book is pretty candid. I’ve come as close to the truth as I can.”
For readers, the book’s relative credibility was among the least of its problems. “Philip Roth sent me The Facts,” Kazin wrote in his diary on September 25, 1988, “the latest issue in the plentiful long-standing journal of PR’s every moment, love, emotion and visit to the analyst. After portraying himself under different names in some seven thousand novels, and after finding a counter-life, counter-Roth, counter-weight in the thinly imagined Nathan Zuckerman . . . he now gives us the ‘facts.’ ” The next day he wrote Roth directly, turning the same withering assessment into an exquisitely backhanded compliment: He was in “awe,” he said, since the book made him realize “that only a brilliant novelist can recycle his own story in so many ways. . . . Anybody but such a novelist would have had the world howling ‘Enough already!’ ”—as Kazin himself was howling—“but I notice from the reviews that even the usual dummkopfen fall into fascinated discussion of the roles and counter-roles that you provide.”
Not all the dummköpfen, by a long shot. “Despite Roth’s constant disclaimers that his novels are not his life, the material here is familiar to the point of exhaustion,” wrote Rhoda Koenig in New York magazine. “Obviously, there is still a great sympathy for Roth and a great appetite for his works. I, for one, however, am tired of hearing that old organ grind.” Roth had forbidden himself the contrivance of scenes and dialogue in a book that purported to consist purely of facts, and Updike (under the cloak of “Briefly Noted” anonymity afforded by The New Yorker) was hardly alone in lamenting the “simultaneously dry and watered-down” prose that resulted. Along with other reviewers, however, he applauded (and seemed in accord with) Nathan’s disparaging letter at the end, even while Nathan himself was reluctant to let his creator off the hook so easily: Zuckerman’s letter, said Zuckerman, was “a self-defensive trick to have it both ways.”
ON FEBRUARY 26, 1988, Roth asked his friend Conarroe to come have a look at an apartment he and Bloom were thinking about buying on West Seventy-seventh Street, across from the Museum of Natural History. Conarroe was not impressed, noting in his diary the “skinny living room, small closed-in kitchen . . . mean little room for Claire’s study, AND I heard noise from overhead.” To Roth, though, its spartan quality was more a virtue than not, and $600,000 a small price to pay for a one-bedroom that wasn’t big enough, he hoped, to accommodate Anna Steiger. Meanwhile he also paid $250,000 for a south-facing apartment a few blocks away on West Seventy-ninth, arranging to knock down the wall between its compact bedroom and living room, and so turning the place into a larger, well-lit studio with a small walk-in kitchen; here, too, for a long time, a bed was omitted with Steiger in mind. “I’m home, I’m home,” Roth said to himself excitedly, when they finally moved in that October. “Everything delighted him,” wrote Hermione Lee, who came to interview Roth for The Independent: “the glamorous city skyline from the apartment window, the all-night Puerto Rican food and flower shops, the hundred-and-one television channels, the New York news stories that everyone was always discussing, the badinage in every shop you went into, the busy vociferous Jewishness of New York.”
Roth hadn’t taught since moving to London more than a decade ago, but he refused to live again in New York “like a crazy man locked up in a room by himself,” and let it be known that he wanted a job. After receiving offers from Rutgers and Bard, he ran into the chancellor of the CUNY system, Joe Murphy, at a Yaddo fund-raiser; it so happened Murphy had graduated from Weequahic half a year behind Roth. “I played on his feelings for our old alma mater and its hapless football teams,” Roth wrote a friend. “That did it.” In fact, Roth was tentatively willing to accept a CUNY job for the same salary offered by Rutgers and Bard ($65,000), provided Murphy agree to the following: Roth, with the title “Distinguished Professor,” would teach two courses of his own devising, select his own eighteen or fewer students per course, and be forever exempt from meetings or public appearances of any kind (“I just want to teach”). All this granted, Murphy took Roth on a tour of a few CUNY colleges, and Roth settled on Hunter, in the East Sixties, where Barbara Sproul taught religion.
One of Roth’s courses was titled The Literature of Extreme Situations, and its reading list included Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Genet’s Thief’s Journal, and Into That Darkness, Gitta Sereny’s terrifying account of the extermination camps at Treblinka and Sobibór, via her interviews with their commandant, Franz Stangl, a man ultimately responsible for the deaths of almost a million people. Roth’s students balked at the last: “Why do you give us this to read?” they asked, in effect, and he shrugged: “Because it happened.” One of the final exam questions featured a quote from Borowski:
“[The S. S. men] explain that it is not much farther and they pat on the back a little old man who runs over to a ditch, rapidly pulls down his trousers, and wobbling in a funny way squats down. An S. S. Man calls to him and points to the people disappearing round the bend. The little old man nods quickly, pulls up his trousers and, wobbling in a funny way, runs at a trot to catch up.
“You snicker, amused at the sight of a man in such a big hurry to get to the gas chamber.”
. . . How can Borowski snicker at such a sight, let alone admit to it? Can you describe and make sense of Borowski’s reaction to what he sees and endures at Auschwitz? . . . (250–500 words)
His other course, The Consciousness Industry, was as much for his own benefit as for his students’. While in London Roth had lost touch with American life, and thought it might be useful to scrutinize, each week, a representative American magazine “to determine its cultural and political perspective and to study the means by which it claims the attention of its specific audience.” Roth started at the bottom, with People, and worked his way up to the Harvard Business Review, trying each week to invite a guest who worked at a given magazine—among them, Veronica Geng from The New Yorker, James Atlas from the New York Times Book Review, and Walter Isaacson from Time. Avishai came on behalf of the Harvard Business Review, and remembered how unabashedly fascinated Roth was by the subject of writing for a business community: “He liked the idea that he could get a little window into the world that his father lived with,” Avishai remembered. “He had enough humility to just listen and learn.” Roth also found it a salutary exercise to observe his friends—some of whom excited profoundly mixed emotions—doing what they do best.
For Roth it was a nice change teaching at “a tough urban school” like Hunter, which cost very little and was open to anyone with a diploma from a New York high school. “My students are all truckdrivers and lesbians and dey don’t take to strangers,” he wrote Riki Wagman. “And dey pack a wallop.” These were fellow adults, for the most part, whose lives outside the classroom tended to be complicated. One of his more endearing students, Karen, lived in a rough neighborhood and worked as a stripper; she gave Roth a couple of short stories, and he agreed to meet with her privately (and chastely) to discuss her work. “I like her enormously and admire the sassy bravado with which she approaches just about everything,” he wrote in a recommendation letter for the Columbia MFA program (she was accepted). “She’s also vulnerable and extremely decent.” In 1989, the young woman was showing signs of severe bipolar disorder, and twenty years later, when she got back in touch with Roth, she was living on Medicare at a low-income housing project. By then she’d finished a novel about her “long, uphill battle with mental illness,” wherein Roth appeared as a character who, she feared, failed to do justice to the actual human being. “You were so kind to me,” she wrote Roth, reminding him of the time he’d phoned her at the hospital after a breakdown. “And it is hard to make kindness interesting.”¶
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1986, after eleven years as an FSG author, Roth was friendly enough with his publisher, Roger Straus, to join him and his wife, Dorothea, along with Carlos and Sylvia Fuentes, for a few days in Spain. In Madrid they stayed at the Ritz, near the Prado Museum, where Roth spent most of his free time before he and Bloom rented a car and toured Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, Granada, and Barcelona. “Roger’s way of seeing a town is to drive through in his limo a little slower than he would ordinarily,” said Roth. A couple of years later, Straus wrote a laudatory letter to Roth’s prospective co-op board on West Seventy-seventh, pointing out that he was a “well-known author” with many awards and honorary degrees, as well as (perhaps more important) “a very successful author in monetary terms.” The latter was—thanks to Roger—a rather shaky claim: after more than a decade of middling advances every other year, Roth found himself so strapped he had to sell two of his most valuable possessions—the Kafka manuscript and the Persian rug that used to adorn his living room on East Eighty-first—in order to afford the modest apartment and the studio on the Upper West Side.
His fortunes were about to change. Andrew Wylie was an agent who made a point of courting prestigious authors, whose proper market value could be assessed only via their backlists: “Shakespeare is more important than Danielle Steele,” he said, “in large part because his work is more lasting. So you have to negotiate with an eye toward capturing that long-term value.” The year before, in 1988, he’d added Salman Rush-die to a list of clients that would eventually include the likes of Bellow, Mailer, and Sontag. David Rieff was about to retire from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and become (largely at Wylie’s behest) a full-time writer, and, during a celebratory lunch with Roth, he revealed that Roger Straus had given Roth (and Rieff’s mother) a very, very bad deal over the years. Roth’s total advance for The Counterlife, for instance, was a seemingly munificent (by FSG standards) $450,000: “Get that Caribbean vacation in now,” Roth had written Straus in 1985, while working on what was shaping up to be his masterpiece, “’cause you ain’t goin’ nowhere next year.” What Roth didn’t understand—because, as he admitted, he “didn’t look at the fine print”—was that Straus was paying for world rights, which meant Roth’s foreign sales reverted to FSG (“He’d say, ‘Hey, we got $20,000 from Gallimard,’ ” Roth recalled, citing his French publisher, “and I’d say ‘Great!’ because I thought there was some kind of split or something”); moreover the $450,000 quietly included $200,000 for the paperback rights, which Straus had relinquished for the full term of Roth’s copyright. Finally, Roger was an old-school shmoozer who treated the foreign market as so many friends and colleagues who shared his miserly perspective, and besides he’d already covered his ass with a lowball advance: “In the same way that he wouldn’t be pushed by Philip to pay what the market value was,” Wylie explained, “so too Roger would not demand of Gallimard or Hanser or Mondadori that they pay the market value with Philip.” Wylie estimated that with a proper agent—who could “pull these deals apart and handle the foreign rights and push in each territory”—Roth stood to increase his revenue by about 500 percent.
A few days after that revelatory lunch, Roth attended a retirement party for Rieff where he met (perhaps by design) Wylie. “I discovered what it was like to be a pretty girl at a party,” said Roth. “Every time I turned around, there was this guy.” Roth was flattered, and impressed, and at a subsequent lunch he explained to Wylie that he was about to finish two books more or less simultaneously: a new novel, Deception, and a memoir, Patrimony, that was finished except for the last chapter; meanwhile he’d begun a draft of what would become Operation Shylock. Roth hadn’t accepted an advance for unfinished work since Letting Go, in 1960, but when Wylie announced he could get Roth two million dollars for the three books, Roth said he’d think about it. But he remained skeptical. “Look,” he said, over a second lunch, “this is my livelihood. This is my future. Do not make promises you can’t keep.” The conversation continued back at Wylie’s office, and when the agent neither backed away from his original figure, nor inflated it even more, Roth decided he was “the real thing.”
And yet he hated leaving FSG. He liked the “continuity” (“You break these people in when they work for you: the copy editor, the design lady . . .”), and besides, he was fond of Roger—they’d had some laughs and traveled together in Spain, etc. “I begged him,” Roth remembered. “ ‘Roger, make me an offer that won’t make me look silly for turning down this enormous amount of money.’ ” But the genial Straus refused to budge, and Wylie began canvassing other publishers. The restive Asher had changed jobs again, from Harper & Row to Grove Weidenfeld, where he managed to muster $1.2 million; finally, though, Wylie sold the three books, sight unseen, to Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster for $1.8 million. On August 16, 1989, the deal was announced in the Times (“Roth Changes Houses”), for which Straus affected a kind of worldly insouciance. Reminded that he’d been willing to pay Tom Wolfe (via a paperback deal with Bantam) between five and seven million for his next novel, Straus replied: “I had lunch with Andrew Wylie. He said he could get between $3 million and $5 million for [Roth’s] three books but that I could have them for $1.5 million. I said that’s ridiculous. I told him we paid Philip about $160,000 a book for world rights and they just about break even.” It was true Wolfe commanded a more promiscuous readership—The Bonfire of the Vanities had sold about 750,000 copies in hardcover, roughly the same as another FSG best seller that same year, Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent—but then, for that very reason, Straus might have used some of his windfall to compensate Roth for his relative prestige. “You were so wise not to ask for this information until you had closed with S&S,” Straus grimly noted, providing Wylie with sales figures for Roth’s hardcover FSG titles: The Ghost Writer and The Counterlife had sold 35,697 and 40,806 copies, respectively, but The Anatomy Lesson had sold only 18,718 and The Facts a dismal 13,439.
The following spring, Simon & Schuster published the first of Roth’s three books, Deception, with a rather lurid jacket illustration—a naked couple embracing in bed—and the Times ran a second piece about the two feuding houses, “Roth’s Publishers: The Spurned and the Spender.” “This is not a subject that interests me,” said Roth, taking the high road, whereas his agent was a little more forthcoming: Likening Roth’s relationship with FSG to “a marriage in a rut,” Wylie added, “The covers of his books [at FSG] conveyed the impression that they were difficult and literary”—whereupon he pointed to a poster for Deception: “As you can see, the Simon & Schuster approach is as night to day.” Roger—the Spurned—was informed by the Times of his “somber image” vis-à-vis Roth’s racy new publisher: “Those are just self-serving remarks to cover over the greed and avarice of Mr. Wylie and Mr. Roth,” Straus replied, and for good measure dismissed Deception as “a bad book, by no means Mr. Roth’s finest hour.” Roth, speaking privately, thought it “ill suited” Roger—an heir to the Macy and Guggenheim fortunes, married to a woman with Rheingold brewery millions; born, in short, with “eighty-four silver spoons up his ass”—to accuse Roth, redundantly yet, of “greed and avarice.”
According to the Daily News, “A spy swears she heard Straus remark ‘Oh s——!’ ” when Roth won the National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater in 1995, and “the best part” of winning the Pulitzer three years later, for Roth, was his reunion with Roger Straus. Heading up the marble steps of Columbia’s auditorium, Roth turned and spotted his old publisher behind him. He waited with a smile: “Then I extend my hand and shake his vigorously and I just keep shaking it and don’t let go until he finally says, ‘Congratulations.’ ” Truth be known, Roth had a soft spot for Roger until the very end, and made a point of attending his memorial (“people told stories about how cheap he was”). As for Andrew Wylie, Roth would forever consider him “the perfect agent and a good friend”: “I am enormously fond of him,” he wrote Wylie’s co-op board, in 1992, “have absolute trust in him, and would be even more delighted to be writing this letter if he were moving into my building rather than yours!”
WHILE PROMOTING The Counterlife, in 1987, an exasperated Roth had offered to bare his chest to an interviewer in order to prove that Zuckerman’s quintuple bypass wasn’t based on real life. “No good to me at all,” he said two years later, when he himself had had a quintuple bypass. “I’ve already used it.”
Ever since his first diagnosis of coronary artery disease seven years before, Roth had worried about a sudden heart attack. He exercised obsessively (“part soldier, part monk,” said Bloom) and strictly adhered to a heart-healthy diet, which Bloom was happy to provide (Dick Stern remembered her serving, with wine, “vegetable caviar and cheeseless cheese served on weightless wafers”). During this time, Bloom wrote, Roth became more irritable than ever (“usually with me”), whereas Roth, in turn, was uncomfortably aware of her incipient panic even in moments of minor tumult. For that reason he told her nothing, at first, about an episode in early August 1989 when he was barely able to catch his breath after swimming a single lap in the pool; he clung to the side, heart and head pounding, before seeking the privacy of his studio to phone his friend and physician, C. H. Huvelle. As luck would have it, Roth was scheduled to get his annual coronary checkup at Waterbury Hospital the next day; until then, Huvelle advised him to take it easy and be sure to report the incident to his cardiologist. Huvelle said it was probably just a panic reaction to that day’s visit with Herman, whose condition was vividly deteriorating.
Roth’s doctor at Waterbury, Peter Monoson, discussed the results of his EKG with Roth’s cardiologist at New York Hospital, Charles Smithen, who directed Roth to meet him as soon as possible in the emergency room. During the two-hour trip to New York, according to Bloom, Roth insisted on driving and told her “very calmly” to phone Sandy in Chicago and ask him to come to New York, and also to inform his close friends. As Roth recalled, “She was, as usual, unequal to the stress of the occasion and was hardly what you could describe as supportive. She was mute and timid.” Dr. Smithen was waiting with a wheelchair and motioned for Roth to slow down and have a seat; after X-rays, the patient was wheeled to the ICU and put to bed, where he read Bellow’s new novella, The Bellarosa Connection, with an oxygen prong in his nose. After “a flurry of activity around [his] bed” that night, Roth was informed in the morning that he would have immediate bypass surgery rather than the previously scheduled angioplasty.
Sandy, who’d endured the same five-or six-hour ordeal a few years before, had already arrived when the surgeon, Dr. Krieger, emerged to say the operation was a success and they were free to visit Philip in the ICU. Except for his ghastly scars—an eight-inch incision, from his clavicle to the base of his ribs, was freshly wired shut, and the interior length of his right leg, where they’d harvested arteries, looked like “the old Pan American highway”—he seemed weary but not terribly worse for wear. “Which of my friends is most frightened it’s going to happen to him?” he asked Bloom. One or two of those friends must have spread the word, since the hospital’s public affairs office soon received inquiring calls from the Post and Daily News. Roth had mainly hoped to shield his father, whom he’d phoned on arrival at the ICU: “I said, ‘Dad, someone has backed out of a job at Yale on a weekend and there’s a seminar and they asked me to come down.’ And he said, ‘How much they gonna give you?’ And I said, ‘Ten thousand bucks.’ He said, ‘That’s not bad for a weekend.’ ” Worried the shock of finding out from the newspaper would kill him, Philip phoned again and told him what had happened. He said he was fine, but Herman was in tears: “I shoulda been there,” he said. “I shoulda been there.”
Servadio and her son had arrived in New York a few days before, and were wondering why they hadn’t heard from Philip and Claire, when Sandy phoned and told them about the surgery; he also mentioned that Claire was “in an incredible state”—weeping and barely able to speak. A story Philip would never tire of telling—as it seemed, for him, to put the whole relationship in a nutshell—was included in his novel Everyman, wherein the title character’s third wife becomes a “hazard” in times of emergency: “She certainly didn’t inspire confidence on the morning of the [bypass] surgery, when she followed beside the gurney weeping and wringing her hands and finally, uncontrollably, cried out, ‘What about me?’ ” Sandy worried about leaving his brother in her care, and related his concerns to the cardiologist, who refused to release Philip from the hospital until he agreed to hire two nurses, one for day and one for night, to look after him at home.
Roth became especially close to his day nurse, “a warm, competent, cheery young woman,” he wrote, who “had twice to shout at Bloom in our own house to get her to bring her anxieties under control around me.” As in Everyman, his nurse’s “high-spirited devotion” would lead to an affair once Roth had “recovered his sexual prowess”—a rapport Bloom evidently suspected. Roth’s physical therapist, Lori Monson, arrived one day to give him electrical stimulation for postoperative muscle spasms and was struck by the “attractive young woman” reading beside his bed. As she recalled, “The vibe was pretty intense” when Bloom came home and noticed not one but two young women in the bedroom. On her way out, Monson paused to collect a shopping bag she’d left by the door, and Bloom erupted “Are you taking my things?!”
THE END CAME, for Herman, when his tumor began to interfere with his breathing and swallowing (“It would be better,” his doctor said, “if he didn’t eat”). Around three in the morning on the day of his death, October 25, 1989,# Herman’s night nurse in New Jersey phoned Philip and said her patient was in crisis; Philip told her to call an ambulance and have Herman taken to nearby St. Elizabeth Hospital, where Philip would meet them in the emergency room. Herman was unconscious by the time he arrived, and Philip had to decide on the spot whether to keep him alive on a respirator (“easily the most wrenching decision of my life”); he declined, and spent the next eight hours watching Herman die. As he wrote in Patrimony, his father “fought for every breath with an awesome eruption, a final display, of his lifelong obstinate tenacity. It was something to see.” When it was over, around noon, Roth chose not to notify the hospital staff; he went on sitting there, holding his father’s hand. About an hour later Sandy arrived, saw he was too late, and burst into tears.
Because Herman was a semiobservant Jew, the son of Orthodox Jews, his sons arranged for his burial the next day. As with his mother, Philip was too emotional to read his eulogy, and asked Claire to do it (“which she did willingly and quite beautifully”). After a passage from The Facts about Herman’s near fatal case of peritonitis in 1944, and his tearful reconciliation with his brother Bernie shortly before Bernie’s death in 1981, Philip added a note:
The last one left, the last one gone. Morris. Charlie. Milton. Ed. Betty. Berny [sic]. Herman. I don’t think a day of his life went by when he did not utter one of their names.
He was a solid man. He was an honest man. His sense of loyalty was monumental. . . . He loved his loved ones as doggedly as he did everything. But he was a fighter as well and fighters don’t endure on love alone. He knew how to hate, and who to hate, and was not shy about letting you know the score. He simply did not understand what it meant to quit or to back away or to give in.
Afterward Sandy and Philip and the other mourners shoveled dirt over the coffin, then gathered at Herman’s apartment. “I told Claire last night that I’m going to take an ad in the New York Review,” Philip wrote Kazin a week later: “ ‘Unemployed son, 56 years of experience, excellent credentials, seeks new position.’ ”
Every year for the rest of his life, Roth visited his parents’ graves on their wedding anniversary, February 20, at Gomel Chesed, a run-down old cemetery in Elizabeth where various Finkel relatives are buried. “The visits are emotional but deeply satisfying,” he wrote.
Generally, after standing beside each of these graves for a while, thinking my family thoughts, I walk around the cemetery, invariably reading the gravestones I pass (any number of the names I use in my books are taken from the gravestones there). In all I spend an hour or so alone in the cemetery—I’ve never in my twenty-one years come upon another mourner there—before I leave to drive back to New York.
“Good. You lived,” Everyman’s mother tells him when he visits her grave; very like his creator, Everyman “put no stock in an afterlife and knew without a doubt that God was a fiction and this was the only life he’d have,” but nonetheless spoke to his dead parents and heard their replies. Philip Roth, moreover, liked to pray when he was happy, as he confided to his friend Jack Miles, the former Jesuit seminarian: “I used to do this frequently at Yaddo, during the years when I was recovering from everything, and I have embraced trees and knelt on the ground in the rural isolation of Connecticut. Keep it under your hat.”