CHAPTER
Thirty-Six
EIGHT DAYS AFTER THE AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI ISSUED his fatwa against Salman Rushdie on February 15, 1989, the BBC announced that the author had “broken his silence” and would review The Facts in The Observer because, as Rushdie remarked in the newspaper three days later, Roth’s “responses to being so vilified” by his own people had been “very moving, even helpful, to this similarly beleaguered writer.” Roth responded with a quote that was published on the front page: The “tiny turbulence” he’d experienced in 1959, with the publication of his first book, was hardly comparable to the “international crisis” precipitated by The Satanic Verses, nor was Roth ever remotely so menaced as Rushdie: “If, however, this brave and enormously talented writer has, in his duress, been able to find some strength in reading about my own apprenticeship in the unforeseen consequences of art, I’m both touched and pleased.”
A month or two later, at Bloom’s invitation, Rushdie came to Fawcett Street for dinner, along with his then wife, Marianne Wiggins, and, Roth recalled, “about six secret service guys,” who stationed themselves around the house and on the street outside. Privately Roth considered Rushdie “a great writer” and, as a human being, “an interesting shit.” They’d met once before, at a party given by Roth’s former English agent, Deborah Rogers; Roth had just returned from his trip to Israel in November 1984, and enthused chez Rogers about all the lanky Ethiopian Jews he’d seen as a result of the Israeli rescue mission, Operation Moses. “Did they put them in concentration camps?” Rushdie asked, and Roth told him to go fuck himself. “The next time I saw him he was in my living room,” Roth laughed. “I was going to call the Iranian Embassy”—his voice became urgently sotto voce—“ ‘I won’t tell you my name, but he’s here. . . .’ ”
A year after the fatwa, Roth played another small role in world politics when he visited Prague, post–Velvet Revolution, to interview Ivan Klíma for The New York Review of Books. “It was thrilling to be in unoccupied democratic Prague,” he wrote, almost fifteen years after he’d been harried out of the country by secret police. During his 1990 visit—his last—he remembered a walk he took around Wenceslas Square, where crowds had chanted their ecstatic approval for the revolution. Roth was especially heartened by the sight of pedestrians pausing near a loudspeaker outside the headquarters of Václav Havel’s Civic Forum party, whence was played, on continuous loop, the dull squawking rhetoric of the ousted general secretary of the Czech Communist party, Miloš Jakeš: “Watching people walk back out into the street grinning,” said Roth, “I thought that this must be the highest purpose of laughter, its sacramental reason for being—to bury wickedness in ridicule.” A potently literate people at the worst of times—all the more given the unwatchable diet of state television over the past twenty-one years—Czechs now jammed the bookstores to snap up previously banned works, beginning, of course, with Kafka. The first banned American book to be published in a free Czechoslovakia, however, was Portnoy’s Complaint—this as a rebuke to Soviet-era prudery and also as a fond tribute to its author, the editor of the Writers from the Other Europe series who’d championed the work of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. Four years later, Roth became the first recipient of the Karel Čapek Prize, an award reserved for Czechs (Havel would not receive his until 2008), with only two foreign exceptions, Roth and Günter Grass. Finally, in 2001, Roth was the first-ever recipient (and only American) of the Franz Kafka Prize, which—not unlike the Nobel—recognizes an author’s oeuvre for its “humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, its existential, timeless character, its generally human validity and its ability to hand over a testimony about our times.” Such a recognition, said Roth, “beat Stockholm any day.”
There was, however, one unfortunate result of that trip to Prague in 1990.
Fifteen years before, Milan Kundera had accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Rennes, in France, and was subsequently stripped of his citizenship by the Czech government. During a visit to London, he and Roth had walked around the city while Roth did his best to commiserate: how awful, he said, that Kundera had lost almost everything when he left his native country—his money, home, parents, language. . . . Kundera shook his head and finally stopped and said, a little impatiently, “Philip! No! I lost sixteen girls!”
Within a few years, though, things began to look up: The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published in 1984, in French and English translations, and was an international best seller; during a New York Times interview with Roth that year, Kundera admitted he was nothing but relieved to be free of Czechoslovakia’s “eternal political discussions and their stereotyped and sterile content. . . . I understand Hannah Arendt very well when she says: ‘It’s easier to act than to think under tyranny.’ ” One may imagine how such sentiments went over with writers still suffering under that tyranny, whose books, far from being celebrated, were hardly known in the West. “There appears to be a controversy over what might be called [Kundera’s] ‘internationalism,’ ” Roth remarked to Klíma during their interview in 1990, shortly after the post-Soviet publication of Klíma’s Love and Garbage. Roth had meant to defend Kundera from the charge that he’d “betrayed” his country by writing “for” the French or “for” the Americans, characterizing his recent novels as “a strong, innovative response to an inescapable challenge.” Klíma’s original reaction was so caustic Roth implored him to recast it in milder terms (“I had no intention of censoring the conversation—Ivan had had enough censorship”); what Klíma said instead, for print, was that Kundera’s alleged “internationalism” was “only one of the many reproaches” addressed to him, noting the “bitter struggle” that had continued for Klíma and others in Czechoslovakia while Kundera became rich and famous in France.
Kundera was furious: for years now he’d weathered scathing abuse from less fortunate countrymen such as Klíma, and now Roth, his friend, had effectively invited the man to attack him again in the New York Review. He might have wondered, too, whether his decision to withdraw his books from Roth’s reprint series, in 1985, had something to do with things, and never mind Roth’s relative disdain for Kundera’s best-known book (“The Unbearable etc is everything Milan hates,” Roth wrote Updike: “sentimentality, pornography, and easy politics”). Roth caught wind of his friend’s anger, and tried to explain: “If you think I was stupid and misguided, so be it—I can be stupid too. But don’t be harsh and accuse me of disloyalty. That isn’t fair and it isn’t true. I can only tell you that Ivan Klíma’s answer would not have been quite so moderate had I not argued with him too.”
But it was no use. Kundera refused to speak to Roth or answer his letters. Finally, after more than a decade of silence, Roth wrote again and begged his friend to let the breach heal before it was too late; Kundera agreed, but by then neither man traveled anymore and it was understood they’d never meet again. “I have completely forgotten [how] to speak English,” Kundera replied in a final note, when Roth asked him to be interviewed for a documentary about Roth. “Do not be angry with me, dear Philip, and count on my faithful friendship.”
“CLAIRE IS MAKING a heroic, heroinely adjustment to living in America,” Roth wrote Nina Schneider on September 24, 1988. “It wasn’t easy at the start but she’s resilient and, as we all know, a trooper.” So Roth would have the world believe. At least twice a year, though, without telling Bloom or anyone else, he’d drive sixty-odd miles to the Jersey Shore and order the bluefish platter for $7.95 at his favorite dockside restaurant, Ollie Klein’s in Belmar, then wander the boardwalk for a couple of hours wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into. “Look at those hideous faces!” Bloom observed, familiarly, of an old Jewish couple in Central Park, a remark she repeated to Conarroe while dining at a Chinese restaurant, Shun Lee, near Lincoln Center (“I don’t think she was talking about Episcopalians”). Once, while eating out with both men, she kept decorously whispering the word “Jew”—as ever in public—despite Roth’s assuring her that the word needn’t be whispered on the Upper West Side; by way of proving this, he yelled, “JEW JEW JEW JEW!” once they were out on the street. Rankled by the paucity of Christmas cards from Roth’s friends that year, she cried, “What’s the matter with these Jews!”—whereupon Roth went for a long walk, “wondering how [he] could continue living with this woman.” At a stationery store on Fifty-seventh he bought three Christmas cards and signed them Menachem Begin, Albert Einstein, and Franz Kafka. He left them on the hall table, where she found them the next morning and woke him up with her laughter.
“Phil and Claire in crisis, according to Francine on the phone,” Conarroe wrote in his diary on August 18, 1988. The next day he recorded “a difficult phone conversation with Claire,” and decided he’d better take a bus to Connecticut and see what he could do. As Roth recalled of the episode, Bloom had begun crying almost as soon as she’d arrived at JFK that summer and continued, on and off, for two days. “Eventually I had to ask her—not that I didn’t know the answer—‘What is it? Why are you crying?’ She wanted to be in London, she told me. She wanted to be with her daughter.” This time Roth told her to go then; he’d leave the house while she packed her things, and return once she was gone for good. After he departed, Bloom ran “screaming” half a mile to some neighbors—Inga Larsen and her husband, in fact—who drove her to the Grays; Francine located Roth by phone at the Huvelles and asked if they could bring Claire over. Roth said either Absolutely not—as he claimed in a 1997 interview—or Yes (“influenced by the moderate, conciliatory Huvelles,” he later wrote); in any case Bloom came over, and, according to Roth, fell to her knees: “Clutching at my trousers, she said, ‘I beg you! I beseech you! I implore you! Don’t leave me, please!’ . . . ‘Get up,’ I told her, ‘stand up,’ but she wouldn’t until C. H. and I lifted her to her feet.” “Claire thought she was being evicted, but that got cleared up,” Conarroe wrote on August 21. “Easy bus ride back to N.Y.”
Roth tried again to leave her the following summer—though it might have been a bit later: “Some weeks after [Herman’s] funeral I had a series of nightmares about my dead father,” he wrote in 2011, whereas in 1997, only eight years after the fact, Roth said the nightmares (and hence the contretemps described below) occurred before Herman’s death.* Why does it matter? Because it was either before or after Roth’s quintuple bypass surgery, in mid-August, that (as he recalled) Bloom “began to pummel [him] on the chest with her fists, shouting ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ ” while he thrashed and cried out in his sleep. Roth told a pretty consistent version of the story on various occasions, but only once did he claim that Bloom pummeled a chest that had recently been “sawed open with a bone saw.” Anyway the chest was pummeled, and a disgusted Roth spent the rest of the night at Conarroe’s apartment in the Village. After he’d been gone a few days, Bloom delivered a message via Conarroe that she wanted Roth to meet with her psychoanalyst. According to Roth, this woman explained to him, “Women don’t like weak men. If you’re sick just dial 911, and they’ll take care of you.” Enraged,† Roth returned to West Seventy-seventh and left a note on Bloom’s pillow—“Next time find a strong man”—then proceeded to Connecticut, where he stayed away for three weeks, determined never to return. “And still I went back,” he later wrote. “Shameful. The most shameful thing I’ve ever done. She cried, she begged, I jumped. I am a part of the history of ugly marriages that people have not had the fortitude to leave.” Though of course they weren’t actually married yet.
There was also the problem of his most recent fiction, or whatever it was. After finishing The Facts—and tabling all he could write of Patrimony while Herman was still alive—Roth had felt “altogether stymied” in his work, what with living in a hotel and shuttling back and forth to New Jersey to care for his father. Finally, toward the end of 1988, he began a novel that he provisionally titled Ears because it was written almost entirely in dialogue (this in opposition to his previous rule whereby “all conversations should be summarized except the brilliant ones”): “I’ve gotten down to basics,” he told a friend: “ ‘I want to fuck you, shiksa.’ ‘Suck my cock.’ ”
The novel was an even more explicit tribute to the euphonious delectability of Emma Smallwood, whose appearance as Maria in The Counter-life had caused a stir in Roth’s house. “You love Maria more than you love me,” Bloom had remarked, to which Roth had replied (in roughly the same words as “Philip” in Deception), “Of course I love Maria, she doesn’t exist—if you didn’t exist I’d love you too.” In the past he’d freely discussed his works in progress with Bloom—his “first reader,” he liked to say—but now he was tight-lipped to the point of furtiveness. One day Bloom rushed over to his studio on West Seventy-ninth to share a piece of good news she’d received in the mail, but Roth was so “cold, alarmed, and unwelcoming” that she abruptly and rather crossly departed.
Twenty years before, while in London with Mudge, Roth had read his friend Julian Mitchell’s The Undiscovered Country—a novel partly narrated by a character named Julian who resembles the author. For Roth, this planted an idea about “raising the moral stakes” by making oneself, “Philip,” a “miscreant” in one’s own book—as it happened, the same approach adopted by some of his favorite later discoveries: Genet, Gombrowicz, and above all Céline, whose rabid anti-Semitism on the page was apt to make a reader forget that in real life he was also Dr. Destouches, humanely tending the wretched of Paris. Likewise Roth almost invariably made himself seem worse than he was. “Why not?” he wrote; “literature is not a moral beauty contest.” But of course—as Zuckerman points out in The Facts—Roth also liked to have it both ways, and was wont to remind the reader, in so many words, that “the most cunning form of disguise is to wear a mask that bears the image of one’s own face.”
“Rightly or wrongly,” he later wrote, “there was something hazardous, I thought, in assigning the adulterer my own name and identity, and right off the bat Bloom proved me correct.” On September 25, 1989, Plante recorded in his diary that Roth had given him a typescript of Deception, which Plante stayed up reading that night; the next day he phoned Roth and said he “was very worried about Claire’s reaction.” Roth said he planned to let her read it over the weekend, and, if pressed, he’d simply repeat his previous alibi about Janet Hobhouse serving as the model for the English mistress; in any case he’d insist it was mostly invented. “Even if it is invented,” said Plante, “won’t Claire be humiliated by everyone’s assuming it’s the truth?” “She knows what it is to live with a writer,” Roth blithely replied. The following week Plante called again to ask whether Bloom had read the book. “No,” said Roth.
But one morning, at last, he presented her with the typescript and left for his studio. Bloom would retrospectively give a garbled account of the novel, as if it were a vague compound of both The Counterlife and Deception. “Oh well,” she remembered thinking while reading the typescript, “he doesn’t like my family”—this apropos of the “self-hating, Anglo-Jewish family” with whom the hero lives in England, presumably Bloom’s faint recollection of Maria’s anti-Semitic family in The Counter-life, though of course the Freshfields are Christian. Bloom also mentioned the various “Eastern European seductresses” who come to Philip’s studio for sex, though the Philip of Deception only listens to these women, reserving his carnal energy for the one woman based on Emma. At any rate Bloom claimed to take the aforesaid in stride, but was outraged by Roth’s portrayal of “his remarkably uninteresting, middle-aged wife”—named Claire!—who is forever sobbing over his adultery with younger women. Roth himself would presently admit she was “perfectly right” to object to the use of her name. He hadn’t named the mistress, after all. (“Of course the English mistress has a name,” he playfully wrote Tom and Jacquie Rogers, “but do you think I’m going to blab it all over my book?”)
Meanwhile, that day at his studio, Roth phoned his worldly friend Judith Thurman and explained his predicament; she told him to meet her at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh, where Tiffany was on one corner and Bulgari on the other. At the latter Thurman directed him to buy a three-thousand-dollar serpent ring with an emerald head and diamond tail, and this he did without a moment’s protest.
One of the first things he noticed, on returning to West Seventy-seventh, was his now vomit-stained typescript;‡ then Bloom emerged “like a wraith” (“I felt like Macbeth,” said Roth) and began straightaway berating him—though not, to his mild surprise, about the mistress(es) per se:§ “How dare you represent me as a bourgeois wife! How dare you represent me as a middle-class woman who would be concerned with adultery!” Roth thought back to the time she “nearly went out of her mind” on finding the maid’s note—“Christa called”—but let it go; he promptly agreed to remove her name from the book. She was still inconsolable, so he slipped away and put the little Bulgari box under her pillow in the bedroom. She resumed berating him when he came back, and finally he said, “Why don’t you go into the bedroom and see what’s under the pillow?” A few minutes passed, then she returned smiling with the ring on her finger: “Who cares about that book, anyway?”
It was a momentary lull. In subsequent months she furiously buttonholed friends, and demanded the book’s dedicatee, Rieff, meet her for lunch. “Why didn’t you stop it?” she asked. When Rieff passed this along to Roth, he laughed and said, “I can’t even stop myself”—reminiscent of what “Philip” says to his lachrymose (but now anonymous) mate in Deception:
“I write for a simple and ridiculous pathological reason—because I cannot stop myself! I write what I write the way I write it, and if and when it should ever happen, I will publish what I publish however I want to publish and I’m not going to start worrying at this late date what people misunderstand or get wrong!”
“Or get right.”
WITH DECEPTION, Simon & Schuster pulled out the stops to recoup its investment in Roth. The gleefully hyperbolic publicity campaign included a description of the novel as his “most original, poignant and provocative,” and naturally predicted it would have the same generation-defining impact as Portnoy’s Complaint. The cover of the February 1990 Esquire, where an excerpt appeared, featured a tousle-haired doxy wearing a negligee with one shoulder strap loose. “A famous writer has a mistress,” the caption read. “They meet in a room with no bed. They have sex. They tell lies. They play games with each other. Then he exposes it all in a book.” Will Blythe’s introduction commented on the “fine carpets, paintings,” and “monastic silence” of Roth’s Manhattan apartment, and quoted Roth on the subjects of what feminists would think of his novel (“They’ll probably hate it, but fuck ’em”) and how the magazine might go about pitching his excerpt: “ ‘Philip Roth calls his forthcoming novel Deception. But who can say how far the deception really goes? Is it actually a novel? Or is that the greatest deception?’ ” Such impolitic remarks had been made with the understanding that Roth would have a chance to vet the introduction in advance, and, when Esquire neglected to honor this agreement, Wylie grimly wrote the magazine’s editor, Lee Eisenberg, that Roth was “outraged” and would “not allow his work to appear in Esquire again.”
“His chinless head, nearly bald now, sniffs atop the slender neck with all the indignant sternness of a tortoise testing unfriendly air,” Stephen Schiff generously evoked his subject for a Vanity Fair profile with which Roth had resignedly cooperated when his new publisher insisted. Schiff briskly dismissed the nominal occasion for the piece—Roth’s novel—as follows: “Precious, often tedious, and practically devoid of forward momentum . . . lightweight, almost vapid. And because it grazes themes Roth has already excavated to the depths, it gives off a stale air.” That done, he went on to quote an “old friend” who claimed Roth liked to behave rudely to “girls” at New York parties (Roth pointed out that he hadn’t been to a party with “girls”—in New York anyway—since sometime in the sixties), and, more accurately, that Bloom was rumored to be “upset about the way he’s purloined his private life for Deception.” (“There aren’t enough good things for me to say about them,” Roth remarked of Vanity Fair, which went on to publish an excerpt from Doll’s House about his 1993 stay at Silver Hill psychiatric hospital.)
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s valedictory appraisal of Roth’s work was a fittingly representative performance—fair-minded, full of padding quotes, and finally damning amid faint praise. Roth’s readers, he concluded, “must surely be growing impatient for the author to stop analyzing his imagination and start exercising it, if he hasn’t dissected it beyond repair by now.” Fay Weldon was kinder in The New York Times Book Review, noting that Deception had been published the same week as Thomas Pynchon’s more sprawling Vineland, and that she was happy to find herself “as exhilarated by one as by the other.” Between Vineland and the “neat-and-steely” Deception, she wrote, “range the works of all other writers in the English language.” She did, however, ding the author for being “rather old-fashioned about women” (“To flattery, to the power of the penis, the woman can only succumb”), and there was something of this, too, in Hermione Lee’s review for The New Republic. Lee had mostly approved of the novel as art, but was a little dismayed by Roth’s increasingly “reactionary” bent—the way he (or “Philip”) takes the usual potshots at “feminist objections to his exploitation of women, the xenophobia and the parochialism of suburban Britain, the anti-Semitism of the fashionable English left,” and permits little in the way of opposition. “ ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ ” his mistress says, when challenged to disagree. “Anyone who disagrees is stupid,” Lee glossed—a provocation Roth would rebut in his next novel, characterized by a cacophony of disagreement on all sides.
Unlike his publisher, Roth was scarcely inclined to profess that Deception was his “most original” novel, but as a formal achievement he was mostly satisfied with it, and as ever he dismissed fiction-vs.-autobiography speculation as idle gossip. Perhaps his favorite endorsement came from Jonathan Brent’s father, Stuart, a legendary Chicago bookseller (whom Roth had known for many years and described as a cross between a “Chicago intellectual and Persian rug dealer”): “Deception is a love story that is not a love story, and therein lies the deception. Its real subject is not the wiles of illicit love affairs, but those of the serious novelist, whose material becomes real only as it becomes art. The result is not so much a comedy of manners as a play of magic mirrors—a conjuring performance which I believe you will find to be an utter delight.” Fair enough. In one of the novel’s few scenes that Roth (probably) made up out of whole cloth, Philip’s Czech friend Ivan—based on the director Jiří Weiss, whose much younger wife had left him after they immigrated to the States—accuses Philip of sleeping with his wife, and scoffs at his denials: “Even this you banally fictionalize. . . . Maybe you should have been a wonderful actor instead of a terrible novelist who will never understand the power of a narrative that remains latent.” This made-up scene about Ivan later enables Philip (in perhaps the only other scene that might be indisputably described as pure fiction) to argue convincingly vis-à-vis his jealous wife that everything else is made up too.
For the most part, though, it suited Roth’s imp of the perverse (“what it adds up to, honey, is homo ludens!”) to be almost scrupulously accurate, in the novel, about even the most damning details of his actual life: “Three,” Philip specifies, when his mistress asks how many affairs he’s had with students—the same number that Roth (the real one) gave his biographer. “ ‘What was he like?’ ” asks Philip, pretending to be his own biographer. “ ‘A tall, thin man with a cheap watch,’ ” she replies. And that, too, was true.¶
“ONCE YOU’VE REACHED a certain age and you’ve been married, and you don’t want children, what on earth is the point?” Bloom told People magazine in 1983. “Marriage gets vulgar after the second time.” For more than ten years, Bloom had all but sneered at those who wondered why she and Roth weren’t married (“We don’t need it”), but later, once they moved to America, she became quite adamant to the contrary. Suddenly, according to Roth, she claimed to feel “embarrassed and humiliated,” and wept bitter tears to prove it. In 2014—explaining why he’d married the two women he married, and didn’t marry more suitable partners such as Ann Mudge and Barbara Sproul—Roth said: “It was not for lack of love that I did not marry any of those women I did not marry who would have married me. I did not marry them because none was a finagler, a cheat, or a manipulator made tenacious by panic who would have her man no matter what.”
On January 1, 1990, Bloom wrote Roth a letter asking him to marry her, then went away to London to appear in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken; a meditative three weeks passed before she received Roth’s epistolary consent (“Dearest Actress, I love you. Will you marry me?”)—a moment, Bloom wrote in Doll’s House, of “radiant happiness.”
“I’m going to have to marry her now,” Roth sighed to Thurman on the way to Bulgari. In her New Year’s Day letter, Bloom did her best to soften the blow, explaining simply that “it [was] time” after almost fifteen years together, and assuring him that she had no desire to take his money. As for their Deception controversy, she advanced the novel claim that what had really rankled was not “the silliness over the girls” but rather his mean comments about her “beloved country” (“STOP telling everyone how you hate London”). Finally there was the matter of her “wonderful” daughter: “For God’s sake cut the crap,” she wrote, entreating Roth to wish Anna a happy thirtieth birthday on February 13; it was time for everybody to be friends.
Perhaps the crucial factor in Roth’s decision was the hope that Anna would be “out of [his] hair” for good; if he married Bloom, his thinking went, she’d feel more secure about staying in the States while her adult daughter pursued a singing career abroad. Also he was feeling “reborn” after bypass surgery—“a smashing success,” as Dr. Huvelle assured him: “Now you have a perfectly sound, strong heart and a fine, brand-new blood supply.” Buoyant after years of mortal foreboding, Roth even became sanguine about his moribund attachment with Bloom. “If she believed marriage would help, as she emphatically told me she did, if she thought it would make her happier and solidify her future and bring our union back to life—why not? What’s to lose? Apparently while routing the five grafts to my coronary arteries, the surgeon had unwittingly extracted what was left of my common sense.” In hindsight, of course, it occurred to Roth that he should have left Bloom, at long last, once his health had been restored; indeed, he was on the brink of leaving her when he was first diagnosed with coronary artery disease, in 1982, whereupon he began to worry about “being in the world alone.” By 1990 he’d gotten used to the idea of having a helpmate, however fallible, in his life—someone “to take care of me when I’m old,” as he remarked to friends who inquired about the dire step he was about to take.
Nor was that his only pragmatic thought: hardly a day passed that he didn’t rue the way Maggie had absconded with more than half his earnings as a young man, and now that he was older—and more and more fretful about future productivity—he “did not wish again to turn to the court to adjudicate a marital property dispute and decide where [his] money went.” In her book, Bloom referred to their prenuptial agreement as an “ominous” condition of Roth’s willingness to marry, “glaring in its absence of any provision” for her in case of divorce. Moreover she seemed to imply, via remarks to New York magazine in 1996, that Roth had meant to leave her nothing in the way of an inheritance (“basically it comes down to the fact that Philip didn’t want me to have anything because he felt I would leave it to my daughter”)—a distortion not even supported by Doll’s House, wherein she noted that Roth bequeathed her “a lifetime tenancy in the New York apartment” (which he himself had purchased in toto), “plus a generous sum of money” were he to predecease her during the marriage. The actual agreement—which her own lawyer, Benjamin J. Rosin (whose fees were paid by Roth), had approved—simply ensured that neither party would make a claim on the other’s assets in the event of divorce. Nor was Bloom facing destitution in any case: Her London town house was worth almost three-quarters of a million 1990 dollars, and her total assets were estimated around $1.16 million—less than Roth’s $5.46 million, but still. “So committed was I at this point to becoming Philip’s wife,” she wrote of signing the prenup (and initialing each page after careful perusal), “I accepted the insult offered, and chose to ignore it.”
On April 29, 1990, Roth’s old friend and divorce lawyer, Shirley Fingerhood—by then a New York Supreme Court justice—married him and Bloom at Barbara Epstein’s apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street. Roth’s memory of the occasion was mercifully dim in later years, though he did remember that the many attendees included the Ashers, Tumins, Maneas, Ross Miller, Sandy, “and unfortunately,” he said, “me.” The de facto best man was Avishai, who signed the marriage certificate and, on a moment’s notice, gave a “beautiful toast” (Bloom) about how nice it was to marry one’s best friend. Afterward the happy couple went home and read in bed. A week later Roth rang up Plante in London and told him all about it. “I believe now in fidelity,” he laughed. “Fidelity is terrific”—a pronouncement belied somewhat, at the wedding, when he leered at Inga’s cleavage in passing.
THE PREVIOUS YEAR Bellow had married his fifth wife, Janis Freedman, a graduate student and his secretary at the Committee on Social Thought. Freedman, forty-three years his junior, was a great reader of Philip Roth, whom she made a point of welcoming into their lives. On June 9, 1990, the newlywed Roth and Bloom were invited to a surprise seventy-fifth birthday party for Bellow at Le Petit Chef, near the Bellows’ summer home in Jacksonville, Vermont. One of the female guests observed that the occasion was mostly attended by “a lot of shaky old men with very young wives”—not unlike the guest of honor—but Roth loved the “Chekhovian” ambience of old Russian Jews “popping up to make speeches,” or announcing “I chav a song!”
For Updike’s benefit, Roth summed up the dynamic of his long and somewhat unrequited love for Bellow thus: “I still treat him like the maitre he is, acting in the process a little like the boy I is.” Roth had few illusions about Bellow’s ambivalence toward his work, though he’d gotten the misguided impression that Bellow at least liked Goodbye, Columbus, given the rave he’d written for Commentary (“The Roth review got some of its teeth drawn . . .”). In 2000, well after his friendship with Roth had finally flowered, Bellow admitted in The New Yorker that he “didn’t get much of a kick out of Portnoy’s Complaint” (“I was amused, but it wasn’t pure joy”)—if anything an understatement: his then girlfriend, Maggie Staats, had tried reading Roth’s best seller on an air-plane, but Bellow forbade it until she agreed to wrap the jacket in brown paper. That same year (1969), with his usual eager filial piety, Roth had written the great man, “You may not think it’s done me much good, but nonetheless, reading you all these years has been of tremendous importance to my work”—and seven years later, when Bellow won the Nobel, Roth was among the first to send a telegram: “There IS justice in the world.” Bellow’s colleagues at the Committee, however, would joke ever after in October: “Stay away from Saul today. They’re announcing the Nobel Prize and he can’t win it a second time.”
Roth’s relations with Bellow suffered a grievous setback in 1979, when Roth thinly fictionalized him as Felix Abravanel in The Ghost Writer. “I thought it disgusting,” Bellow said of the whole book, which included Lonoff’s observation of his more famous peer: “Beautiful wives, beautiful mistresses, alimony the size of the national debt . . . it’s no picnic up there in the egosphere.”# In the years following, it suited Bellow to disparage Roth publicly—“What has Roth got?” he quipped to Dick Cavett in 1981—then charmingly apologize afterward, quite in keeping with Mark Harris’s characterization of him as a “drumlin woodchuck,” who (as Robert Frost wrote) “shrewdly pretends / That he and the world are friends.” “I asked Aaron [Asher] to tell you that the Good Intentions Paving Company had fucked up again,” Bellow wrote Roth two years after Cavett, when his rebuke of the Zuckerman books was quoted in People: “Why write three novels that examine one’s career as a novelist? Things are bad out there. The knife is at our throats. One can’t write books so attentive to one’s own trouble.” Bellow assured Roth he’d also told “the crooked little slut”—viz., Roth’s People profiler—what a good writer Roth was; that said, he belittled Roth further by suggesting that Roth had bought the whole “Freudian explanation” that a “writer is motivated by his desire for fame, money and sexual opportunities,” whereas Bellow himself had never taken such motives seriously. “If my three books are about a writer motivated by his desire for fame, money, and sexual opportunities,” Roth replied, betraying rare impatience with his wily maître, “I’ll eat the foot in your mouth. What is surprising to Zuckerman is that he too writes for all THE GREAT REASONS, but what he gets is fame, money, and sexual opportunities. . . . I’m a big boy now with very little hair and I really do understand these things.” Having gotten that off his chest, Roth reverted to his usual magnanimity and assured Bellow of his “admiration and affection.”
As for Bellow’s often vexed relations with women (especially wives), Roth was nothing but sympathetic. Both were bewildered by charges of misogyny, since it seemed to them the problem was opposite—that is, an all but helpless susceptibility, sexual and otherwise, hence a mutual tendency to stay in touch with old girlfriends, give them money, and basically remain interested in their lives. When Bellow visited London in April 1986, his fourth wife, Alexandra, had just “thrown [him] out” and he was, as he put it, “in the dumps”; moreover he disliked his hotel. Roth got him a nice room at the Royal Automobile Club and fixed him up with a flirtatious Edna O’Brien at a dinner party. “Philip,” she rang him up the next day, “did the Nobel Prize winner ask for my phone number?” “No, I’m afraid he didn’t.” Pause. “Good, I didn’t want him to.”
BELLOW WAS ROTH’S HERO—all the more so over time—though all good writers were heroic after a fashion and Roth was never shy about showing them a seemly regard. “Contact with writers I admire or toward whom I feel a kinship,” he told Joyce Carol Oates, “is precisely my way out of isolation and furnishes me with whatever sense of community I have.” His long if sporadic friendship with Don DeLillo, for instance, began the summer of 1988, when Roth read his colleague’s new novel and was moved to write one of his typical fan letters: “The only thing comparable to Libra would have been the Warren Commission Report written by Dreiser, Dos Passos, and William Burroughs.” He proposed they meet for an afternoon walk, which became something of a semiannual ritual (though Roth found DeLillo almost disconcertingly silent and couldn’t help wondering what the man really thought of him).
Roth also had a hand in discovering Louise Erdrich: as an occasional manuscript reader for his friend William Whitworth at The Atlantic, Roth selected Erdrich’s “Saint Marie” as an “Atlantic First” for the March 1984 issue. The story was excerpted from her first novel, Love Medicine, which Roth touted to friends as the work of a “Native American Flannery O’Connor”; he wrote as much to the “astounded” author herself, who, with her husband and his two adopted children, met Roth for a jolly lunch in Connecticut the following year. Erdrich’s first novel went on to win the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, but, throughout her thirty-three-year friendship with Roth, he never mentioned that he was the one who’d put her up for it (as the Academy archive shows), among other favors.
He also did whatever he could for Douglas Hobbie, who was fated to have a far less illustrious career than Erdrich. “The sure-footedness of this rookie is dazzling,” Roth wrote in praise of Hobbie’s first novel, Boomfell, in 1991, “—I enjoyed everything, the ductile idiom, the narrative nimbleness, the ironizing fugue of countervoices, the poker-faced comedy, and, most enjoyable of all, Hobbie’s skeptical-mordant-tender scrutiny of desire bamboozled and lust recklessly and grievously pursued.” Thus plucked (he hoped) from the abyss of first-novel oblivion, the forty-something Hobbie abjectly replied to Roth that his endorsement had “felt like confirmation of a sort (religious connotation intended).” Soon the two men were meeting regularly in Warren and Conway, Massachusetts, where Hobbie lived about two hours to the north, or else midway in Great Barrington, and meanwhile Roth saw to it that Boom-fell received that year’s Rosenthal Award from the Academy.
The friendship lasted six years, until a day in May 1997 when Roth wrote Hobbie a regretful note: “I read the first fifty pages of your manuscript last night”—Hobbie’s third novel, This Time Last Year—“and I’m going to stop there because I don’t think the book is for me. With the exception of a few strong pages—34–35 and 37–38—I found myself out of sympathy with virtually every sentence I read.” Hobbie was flabbergasted at such “cavalier” treatment from a friend: “There are several different fucking voices in the fucking novel and there’s plenty of fucking good writing,” he protested. Roth mildly replied that he’d read those first fifty pages very carefully, and, to prove it, he mailed the marked-up typescript to the author, who remembered such marginal scrawls as “Douglas, what happened?!”
As for Janet Hobhouse, Roth had liked her first book about Gertrude Stein but didn’t think much of her novels and never hesitated to say so. Still, they remained friends and occasionally met for lunch in London, where Hobhouse returned after her divorce in 1980. They’d been a bit out of touch when Hobhouse got cancer in the mideighties, whereupon Roth phoned her at the hospital—a conversation he included almost verbatim in Deception:
“I think we must be friends again now, old friends. Anyway, I’m not completely out of the woods, so you can still be a little nice to me.”
“And when you are completely out of the woods?”
“Then you can return to normal.”
They fell out of touch again after Hobhouse’s rather miraculous recovery, but a few years later her cancer returned and this time Roth was among her most faithful friends. He accompanied her to chemotherapy sessions, and one day spent almost three hours with her at an East Side restaurant, Petaluma, awaiting the results of a test that would determine whether her tumor had shrunk. Roth promised to “fuck her silly” if the news was good, and she asked him to put it in writing; finally, at three o’clock, she phoned her doctor and learned the worst: the tumor hadn’t shrunk, and therefore she was probably doomed. She and Roth spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the park, then he took her home.
About a month later, on February 1, 1991, Hobhouse died suddenly of a chemo-induced thrombosis. She was forty-two. At the funeral Roth thought of Hobhouse’s various qualities—her “verbal slyness and quickness,” her depth, her youth—and began to sob. She’d died broke, and her only family in America was her dead mother, a suicide, who was buried in Cornwall Cemetery about five miles from Roth’s house in Warren. Roth bought his old lover a plot there ($750) and also paid the gravedigger ($450). He was alone in Connecticut that winter, and every few days he’d visit the cemetery and kneel on Janet’s grave, imagining her young and beautiful again, looking up at him and laughing: “Now you love me.”