CHAPTER
Thirty-Seven
PATRIMONY, PUBLISHED AT THE BEGINNING OF 1991, was received with almost universal acclaim. Readers seemed grateful that Roth had dispensed, for now, with what his new Times reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, called his “defensive mirror games”—this in favor of a sustained and (for some) surprising expression of deep filial tenderness. “I just saw Aharon Appelfeld at lunch,” Avishai wrote his friend from Israel. “We agree that if this is not your best book, it is at least your best you.” Roth claimed to be mystified: “I don’t know what’s happened,” he told his friend Alain Finkielkraut. “I’m loved! What did I do wrong?”
Not everyone loved him, of course. Faithful detractors such as Commentary and an old foe, Rhoda Koenig (in New York), took bitter exception to the passage about his father’s loss of bowel control. Noting that Roth had promised his father—in the book!—not to tell anyone, Koenig snapped, “Sure, Dad, no one but the Book-of-the-Month Club.” She also had hard things to say about Roth’s (admiring) description of his father’s penis, and so forth. Roth, for his part, conceded that Herman “might not have liked some things” but he was, after all, dead: “So we needn’t speculate.” Still, most agreed with Kakutani that Patrimony was a “beautifully rendered portrait of a father and a son,” and the book earned Roth another National Book Critics Circle Award and made a few best-seller lists. Even the hitherto caustic John Leonard saw fit to commend the author, albeit a trifle condescendingly: “Philip, at last, is all grown up.”*
“I’m not known for making speeches,” Roth said, accepting the Medal of Honor from the National Arts Club on February 28, 1991. “Making speeches, ladies and gentlemen, is the thing I like least to do in life.” And yet Roth was, in fact, an exceptional reader of his own work, and such speeches as he’d given over the years—his 1960 National Book Award speech, for example, which led to “Writing American Fiction” at that year’s Esquire symposium—had been rather successful, or anyway memorable. Given, too, that he’d recently published a beloved best seller, Roth decided it was time to let his wife’s booking agency, Royce Carlton, make good on its promise that he could earn five to ten thousand dollars per appearance for hour-long Patrimony readings at various colleges. A further incentive—at least for reading at his own alma mater—was the esteem his latest book had won from Miss Martin, certainly relative to its predecessor. “I’m just an old woman who grew up in Central Illinois,” she’d written Roth, “and I’ve never understood such involutions and complications as make up Deception.” Thus, for her sole delectation, Roth composed “The Mildred Martin Guide to DECEPTION,” but the central problem remained: “why so much use of fuck? You are at no loss of words. This one gets monotonous. . . . anyway no more Deceptions. / Forgive me, / Mildred.”
“Nationally Renowned Poet [sic] to Do Reading at Bucknell,” announced the nearby Williamsport Sun-Gazette of Roth’s April 1 appearance at Bucknell Hall, where the poetry library and lounge had recently been renamed in honor of his mentor. In his reading script, Roth had carefully scribbled “who’s sitting right there” (reminding himself to point at her), above the line where he declared the evening was “dedicated to [his] teacher and friend, Professor Mildred Martin.” His reading was a radical abridgment of Patrimony—from the discovery of Herman’s tumor all the way to the end—and Roth left nothing to chance, practicing for weeks on end and constantly adding little directions with his red Flair pen: “beat / beat / beat” he scribbled above the phrase “could not stop,” as in “Eating was [Lillian’s] only revenge, and like the tumor, it was something he could not stop, no matter how he railed against it”; every so often, too, he noted in margins exactly how much time should have elapsed. His labor paid off: the readings, performed at some twenty venues over the next two years, were a hit—but none so much as that first reading before a standing-room-only crowd plus Miss Martin in the front row. “You made it! You made it!” Roth excitedly muttered to himself afterward, wandering the streets of Lewisburg. He would always consider it one of the great nights of his life.
IN RECENT YEARS, Roth’s affair with Inga Larsen had tapered off with the worsening of her alcoholism, which she’d mostly managed to conceal from him. On January 6, 1991, Inga entered a twenty-eight-day recovery program in Minnesota; a day or two before leaving, she phoned Roth and told him she was an alcoholic. “After beeing [sic] reassured that it did not involve you in any way,” she rather pointedly reminded him twenty-one months later, “you were very supportive of me.” Later Roth put her in touch with his AA friend Joanna Clark, and the two attended meetings together.
Once Inga got sober, her affair with Roth flourished—became less about hijinks and more of a bona fide romance. Her nightly AA meetings provided the perfect cover for trysts: after dinner with her family, she’d stay at a meeting just long enough to steep herself in cigarette smoke, then head to Roth’s house for two or three carefree hours. Bloom’s occasional visits to the country were brightened as a result. As Roth observed, “Adultery makes numerous bad marriages bearable and holds them together and in some cases can make the adulterer a far more decent husband or wife than . . . the domestic situation warrants. (See Madame Bovary for a pitiless critique of this phenomenon.)” Certainly everyone agreed that Roth behaved like a model husband on the occasion of Bloom’s sixty-second birthday (February 15, 1993), putting their friends up at a local inn and hosting a celebratory dinner at their favorite restaurant, the West Street Grill in Litchfield, where Roth gave a loving toast that moved his wife to tears. C. H. Huvelle assured him afterward that the evening had been “a smash hit” (“it was particularly kind of you to seat [Inga’s] mother at your side”), and reminded him that they were getting ready for “the next Big One”: Roth’s sixtieth birthday party, chez Huvelle, the following month. Inga and her husband were cohosts, and while setting up for the party she came tottering in with a flamboyant bouquet of sixty roses. Huvelle—the only person (other than Sandy, Thurman, and Ross Miller) who knew about her affair with Philip—took Inga aside and admonished her to make the roses a gift from her mother and oldest daughter instead, as she did.
Joel Conarroe stood before the twenty-two guests as emcee, reading aloud letters from absent friends, including a telegram from the goyish Updike that, in fact, Conarroe had composed himself: “Masel gov, you alte cocker. Much nachos on this glorious yuntuva to you and your mishpocha. Zei gesunt.” Inga’s husband and Francine Gray gave heartfelt toasts, and Bloom read some love sonnets from Shakespeare. Then Roth rose, and—trying not to grimace from a fearful spell of back pain—gave a speech that Plante described in his diary as “funny and tender.” Finally the guests were entertained by a wonderful young magician Roth had discovered at the Pump Room in Chicago.
“Can I quit now?” Roth wrote Miss Martin after finishing his latest novel, Operation Shylock, which had caused the author “more misery than all the other books combined.” Almost every morning for three years he’d flipped through the cards of his alphabet frieze—the capital A, the small a; the capital B, the small b—reciting such incantations as “Words, words, words” and “I’m free, I’m nineteen, I’m unpublished, I can write what I want.” Also he reminded himself with an emphatic, all-caps memo: “DO NOT JUDGE IT / DO NOT TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT. / DO NOT CENSOR IT.” The result of such persistent hectoring, he hoped, would be his masterpiece, and no less than the canonizing sage of Yale, Harold Bloom, seemed to bear him out: “The largest praise is that Operation Shylock for me matches Gravity’s Rainbow,” Bloom wrote him, after reading an all-but-final draft in August 1992. “They are the two American fictions of the last generation or so that, for me, share canonical place with Merrill and Ashbery among the poets.” Cynthia Ozick went even further, proclaiming Roth to be a “divine manifestation” before whom she went down “on [her] knees”: “In the Ultimate Library, they’ll put you somewhere between Dostoyevsky and Mark Twain.”
For Shylock, Roth plunged almost giddily into the publicity campaign prescribed by his deep-pocketed publisher, all the more since he genuinely believed the book deserved a big sale and that it would make Roger Straus look bad. Moreover his imp of the perverse had dictated that he pretend this time, even to Simon & Schuster, that the novel’s account of his becoming a Mossad agent (etc.) was, indeed, a true “Confession” as per the book’s subtitle: “You know from our conversations—and, of course, from the book itself—that I believe Operation Shylock to be as accurate a report as I could write of my experiences in Israel in 1988,” he wrote his editor, Michael Korda.
On the other hand, the Mossad has requested, for reasons of its own, that I publish the book as fiction. I think you know by now all my reasons for deciding to do as they wish. I hope that you and Simon and Schuster will do everything to facilitate my decision. The almighty Israeli intelligence service is not an agency that either you or I would want to treat capriciously.
Simon & Schuster seemed a little befuddled by things: the book was duly classified as fiction when the first wave of review copies went out in January, then changed to nonfiction when Roth kept publicly declaring it had really happened. Library Journal reviewed it as fiction, but added a disclaimer: “Roth reported in The New York Times, March 9, 1993, that all events depicted in this book are in fact true but that the Mossad insisted that he bill it as fiction.—Ed.” In the Times Roth had pleasantly complained, hardly for the first time, that people were forever convinced he’d been writing about himself in Portnoy and the Zuckerman novels: “And now when I tell the truth, they all insist that I made it up. I tell them, ‘Well, how can I make it up since you’ve always said I am incapable of making anything up?’ I can’t win!” He even agreed to cooperate with a BBC documentary, his first TV appearance since his WNET interview in 1966: “he has broken his long silence to set at least some of the record straight about his life, his books, and the links between the two.” The documentary featured commentary from the likes of Bellow and Kazin, while a poker-faced Roth more or less accurately discussed his life, and finally repeated the claim that his “Mossad supervisor” had forced him to label his latest work as fiction. Kazin—in the privacy of his diary, at least—took a dim view of such shenanigans, dourly recording his wife’s observation at the breakfast table: “Can you imagine Kafka selling himself like this?”
Since people liked to read Roth’s novels as autobiography, Roth believed his fiction was an essential part of his life story: “AGAINST ITSELF / The Autobiography of an Antithesis,” he’d intended to title his final (since he earnestly wished to retire) magnum opus, a multivalent self-portrait that would bring together his last four books in a single volume: “Part One / The Facts, a Novelist’s Autobiography / Part Two / Deception, a Novel / Part Three / Patrimony, a True Story / Part Four / Operation Shylock, a Confession.” Such a concerted muddle was not an idle conceit to Roth. In 1998, an obscure writer named Richard Elman—sometimes confused with the great Joyce biographer, Richard Ellmann, a friend of Roth—would admit in his book Namedropping that he’d once met “a certain well-known screen actress” who, to his surprise, had agreed to go home with him and have wild, all-night sex. “Oh come on,” she said the next morning, when he wondered why she kept calling him Phil, “I’d recognize you anywhere, Phil Roth. I loved every minute of Portnoy.” Reading this, the real Phil Roth realized that a couple of strange actresses he’d once seen on The Tonight Show—tittering about what a “sexual madman” he was—may well have been talking about Elman or some Elman-like person; the same possibility had occurred to him re any number of tabloid stories from the Portnoy era (“Barbra Streisand has no complaints”). The idea of a doppelganger leading a life “that has nothing to do with your life” moved Roth to conceive of the other “Philip Roth” in Shylock, whom he dubbed Moishe Pipik—Moses Bellybutton—after the imp invoked by his aunts and uncles whenever he said or did something endearingly ridiculous as a boy: “the little guy who wants to be a big shot, the kid who pisses in his pants, the comical shadow alongside whom we had all grown up.”
“It’s Zuckerman,” Roth thinks, in the novel, when his (fictional) cousin Apter first informs him of his double’s presence in Israel, “it’s Kepesh, it’s Tarnopol and Portnoy—it’s all of them in one, broken free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me.” What Pipik purports to be, vis-à-vis the “real” Roth, is “THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS”: to wit, a private detective from Chicago, also named Philip Roth, who is dying from cancer but determined to enact his concept of “Diasporism”—a plan to avert a second Holocaust in the Middle East by returning European Jews to their original homelands; once the population of Israel is thereby halved, Pipik explains, “then the state can be reduced to its 1948 borders, the army can be demobilized, and those Jews who have lived in an Islamic cultural matrix for centuries can continue to do so, independently, autonomously, but in peace and harmony with their Arab neighbors.” This strikes the real Roth as “the final solution of the Jewish problem for Yasser Arafat,” and indeed he finds a receptive audience for Diasporism in his old university friend, George Ziad, a Palestinian who’s filled with rage against the Israeli occupiers. Roth, pretending to be his own double, explains to Ziad that he “got the idea” for Diasporism from Irving Berlin: “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! . . . He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely!” Despite his perverse performance for Ziad, the real Roth is only too aware that it would take more than Irving Berlin to rid Christianity of its Jew hatred: “Diasporism is a plot for a Marx Brothers movie,” he says; never mind how Diasporist evacuees would be received in “bigoted, backwater, pope-ridden Poland”—or Germany, Romania, Ukraine, et al.—Roth wants “to see with [his] very own eyes the welcoming committee of English Goyim waiting on the platform with their champagne. ‘They’re here! More Jews! Jolly good!’ ”
That Jews may not meet with ecstatic receptions from their Christian countrymen is a problem Pipik claims to address with an organization designed to purge the world of anti-Semitism: Anti-Semites Anonymous. One of Pipik’s “workout tapes” for one of their meetings, however, is titled “Did the Six Million Really Die?”: a long rant (almost six pages of fine print) blaming the partial extinction of European Jews on “the breakdown of the German supply system at the end of the war” and outbreaks of scurvy and typhus in the camps—this versus the Jewperpetuated hoax (as Pipik would have it) of “Holocaustomania.” “Man, how can you not be anti-Semitic?” he concludes. “When you see them they’re all on the fucking telephone, manipulating. For better jobs. Or helping their friends.” Thus Roth comes to suggest that his closest double is not a sinister anti-Semite like Pipik, but the immortal villain evoked by the greatest writer in English—the “hook-nosed moneylender,” Shylock, the archetypal Jew throughout the ages in Europe: “the Jew expelled in 1290 by the English, the Jew banished in 1492 by the Spanish, the Jew terrorized by Poles, butchered by Russians, incinerated by Germans, spurned by the British and the Americans while the furnaces roared at Treblinka.”
Stationed at the entrance of the Treblinka gas chamber was a notorious guard, Ivan the Terrible—beating his victims with pipes, gutting them with a sword—who may or may not be the “hardworking, churchgoing family man” from Cleveland, John Demjanjuk, ostensibly Ivan’s polar opposite. Roth and Pipik, too, seem to have little in common except name and physical resemblance (“he looked like the after to my before in the plastic surgeon’s advertisement”), and Roth wonders whether Pipik got the idea for appropriating his identity from watching this man’s trial. Meanwhile Roth—of all people—knows that a single human being can accommodate drastic contradictions, and hence can easily imagine that the harmless-looking oaf seated in the dock may well be the same man who tortured multitudes at Treblinka:
What a job! A sensational blowout every day! One continuous party! Blood! Vodka! Women! Death! Power! And the screams! . . . A year, a year and a half of that is just enough to satisfy a man forever; after that a man need never complain that life had passed him by; after that anyone could be content with a routine, regular nine-to-five job where no blood ever really flowed except, on rare occasions, as a result of an accident on the factory floor.
And hence, too, the duality at the heart of modern Israel: throughout the novel the historical suffering of the Jewish people is balanced against Israel’s brutality toward the Palestinians, the whole seething conflict coming to a head at last, it seems, with the Intifada. And Roth’s own ambivalence is reflected in the stridency of voices on every side. So determined is he, indeed, to let every conceivable side of the argument be heard at lovingly nuanced length that he overindulges an old tendency described by Kazin as “the aria bit”: monologues that go on and on until merely recreational readers are apt to collect their things and head for the exits. Since Ziad and others are given abundant opportunity to vilify Israel, countervailing voices are perforce given equal time: that of the wheelchair-bound martyr Leon Klinghoffer, for instance—murdered by the PLO aboard the cruise ship Achille Lauro—whose laughably dull diary fills four fine-print pages, often beginning with a gloss on the weather. No wonder even some of Roth’s most incisive admirers tend to be a little reluctant to revisit Shylock as elective reading. “I can see it’s a dazzling piece of work,” said Hermione Lee, “but I feel like Keats sitting down to read King Lear again.” She laughed. “Must I again?”
Roth was in San Francisco (for a Patrimony reading) when Bloom rushed to their hotel room to show him an early Time review that seemed to augur great things: “Roth has not riffed with quite this comic abandon since Portnoy’s Complaint. And the social and historical range of Operation Shylock is broader than anything the author has attempted before.” By the time Roth returned east, however, a slew of more damning reviews had followed, including what would prove the first of many brickbats wielded by Kakutani of the Times: The comedy and sociopolitical commentary of Roth’s novel, she wrote, were “subsumed” and “overshadowed” (both) “by the author’s tiresome games with mirrors.”
An even nastier shock lay ahead. There was a time when Updike had hesitated to review his “American contemporaries” because, as he explained to Aaron Asher (in the course of declining to review The Professor of Desire), “Envy pulls one way, and friendship (in many cases, including this) another.” But soon enough he let go of this scruple. Bellow was thinking of Updike’s canny disparagements when he referred to “the fastidious goy critics on guard for the Protestant establishment and the genteel tradition,” whereas Roth, less thin-skinned, had remarked in print that Updike’s mixed review of The Anatomy Lesson was “first class,” and he’d also professed to be satisfied with the man’s even pricklier assessment of The Counterlife. As for Roth’s view of Updike’s work, he could scarcely have been more generous; though disinclined to write much in the way of formal criticism, he made a point of dropping Updike a letter of considered praise for almost every new novel, not least the recent Rabbit at Rest: “You’re the master of Joyce’s great modern trick,” he wrote, “—what Lewis, O’Hara, and Dreiser didn’t dare to do: join the social position and vernacular of a Leopold-Rabbit to the perceiving mentality of a Joyce-Updike.” Quite properly this struck Updike as “a lovely act of readership,” and left him feeling all the more chastened for his less charitable (and more public) treatment of Roth: “what a niggle-mouthed slyly hedging critic I am in comparison.”
Alas, there was nothing sly or hedging about Updike’s abuse of Shylock in the March 15, 1993, New Yorker. “Some readers may feel there has been too much Philip Roth in the writer’s recent books,” he announced at the outset. “Such readers should be warned: there are two Philip Roths in his new novel.” It went downhill from there. “It’s hard to wrap your mind around this paragon,” Updike wrote of “Philip I”—that is, the author’s persona in the novel—whose supporting cast appears to be in a competition to praise him, from Pipik’s “slavish flattery” to Ziad’s, Jinx Possesski’s, and Smilesburger’s remarks about his independence, leadership, and literary achievement respectively. “Somewhere after Philip I sleeps with Jinx, the novel stops pretending to coherence and becomes a dumping ground, it seems, for everything in Roth’s copious file on Jewishness.” Picking one’s way over this landfill was, for Updike, an “exhausting” affair: Roth’s characters talk and talk “until their mouths bleed,” and there are too many of them (“they keep dropping out of sight, and when they reappear they don’t talk the same”). Casting about for a positive note to end on, Updike commended his colleague’s “artistic energy” withal, suggesting the novel was de rigueur for “anyone who cares about (1) Israel and its repercussions; (2) the development of the postmodern novel; (3) Philip Roth.”
Quite apart from Updike, there was plenty to dismay Roth about the reception of Shylock. Though Harold Bloom had compared him with Aristophanes in The New York Review of Books, and the novel would go on to win Roth the first of his three PEN/Faulkner Awards, sales were fairly dismal in spite of the hype and Simon & Schuster abruptly stopped advertising. Worse still was the apathy of his key constituency: Jews, American and Israeli, outraged or delighted. “Will Roth be impaled on incensed Jewishness once more?” D. M. Thomas wondered in his front-page review for the Sunday Times. Given Roth’s “merciless probing” of Israeli brutality, Thomas wrote, Roth “would be smart to have a double undertake his promotional tour.” Indeed, Roth’s own great expectations for his book had included a Rushdie-style scandal—at least in the Middle East—but no. Reviewing Shylock for the Jerusalem Post, S. T. Meravi noted, benignly enough, that the novel had been largely ignored: “The man hasn’t lost any of his estimable skill; he’s just lost an estimable readership. Which may be the ultimate comment on the Israel-Diaspora question.” Now that was depressing.
ROTH’S MARRIAGE also had a morale-lowering effect, though things had gone surprisingly well at first. “My ordinary, everyday life with Claire, especially in the country, fills me with a satisfaction I’ve never known before,” he wrote DeLillo on January 16, 1991. “It unnerves me a little that I can be made happy by the life I used to be impatient with. In the old days everything outside of writing bored the shit out of me. Now it’s the writing that bores the shit out of me, and the walks, the eating, the sleeping, the comradery [sic] that thrills me.” The couple had made a point of keeping their marriage certificate magnetized to the fridge in New York, and would entertain friends with spontaneous improvisations of bantering cockneys or whooping Indians; meanwhile Roth insisted on pouring her cereal (or whatever) while announcing in a “Jew voice” (Avishai), “You don’t lift a finger! You’re a Roth now.”
“He’s very uxorious and tremendously involved with Claire’s career,” David Rieff had told Vanity Fair, and so he was. Back in the early eighties, when Bloom’s acting jobs had dried up again, Roth pushed her to do one-woman shows featuring the great speeches of Shakespeare’s heroines. She was, after all, one of the preeminent Shakespearean actresses of her time, having played Cordelia to Gielgud’s Lear, Lady Anne to Olivier’s Richard III, and Ophelia to Paul Scofield’s Hamlet. After grueling rehearsal sessions in Roth’s studio, they tried out the show at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where Roth conferred with the playwright William Gibson (The Miracle Worker) about proper stage lighting, microphone levels, and so on. Leon Botstein conducted music for one such performance, and likened Roth’s engagement to that of a “stage parent” (“You felt you would be subject to his ire if something went wrong”). Later Bloom expanded her repertoire to include characters such as Mrs. Dalloway and Jane Eyre, and Roth always took it upon himself to come up with pithy titles—e.g., “The Triumph of the Bereft Woman: Charlotte Brontë’s JANE EYRE.” (“Why? Why?” he wondered in a 2013 email. “I must have been nuts. / The ex-idiot, PR.”)
Roth was especially doting to Bloom qua actress, and especially in the presence of their friends. “I have to go backstage now and see my little tchotchkala,” he’d sweetly announce after one of her performances. Indeed, the more insightful of their friends detected a quality of playacting to the whole relationship (“everything was perfect, but could shatter if someone made a false move”). Because of the couple’s well-choreographed rapport, some were shocked by the rupture that lay ahead, while others had always viewed the match as essentially artificial (whether or not they knew of its more dire shortcomings)—that is, as a meeting of great artists in the abstract, modeled on Chekhov and Olga Knipper, a paradigm Roth cherished. But a 1991 note in his slanted lefty handwriting indicates a man struggling to grasp the person he’s married: “[Claire] has many wonderful, endearing and admirable qualities,” he began, then considered the various men in her life: “Sadists and bullies. Burton, Steiger, Elkins. Finally only a criminal [Elkins] could protect her (Fear led her to seek protection from sadists or bullies who seemed ‘strong.’ . . .) At bottom is fear . . . Fear of Anna. . . .”
The last was most germane to the health of their marriage. “The [Felicity] event was the coup de grâce, of course,” said Anna Steiger of the sexual advance Roth had made toward her friend in 1988. “After that it was only avoid avoid avoid.” She’d tried begging off on the wedding, claiming another engagement, but relented after a series of tearful phone calls. Neither on that occasion nor any other, however, did she bother to dissemble a baleful contempt for her latest stepfather—though of course, to their mutual chagrin, they could hardly help crossing paths. While in New York, Steiger stayed at the Cosmopolitan Club on East Sixty-sixth, but “camped out” (as Roth put it) during the day at her mother’s apartment, making phone calls from Roth’s study while he worked at his studio and sometimes, as he’d find on his return, lying between the sheets of his bed. Nor had Bloom become any more independent—as Roth had fondly hoped—now that an ocean divided her from her daughter; on the contrary she’d taken to phoning Anna in Europe sometimes three or four times a day. As for Steiger’s visits to Connecticut, they were infrequent but unbearable to all concerned. She was bored by the country, and her mother “would work feverishly” (Roth) to keep her diverted and out of her husband’s way. Given the terrible tension, Roth was “flabbergasted” when a real estate agent phoned one day, in the women’s absence, to report on a nearby house the two were thinking about buying. For Anna.
Inga bore the brunt of Roth’s rage and desperation, as he was forever phoning her at the office to vent. “The way I see it is: you are powerless over the Claire-Anna relationship,” she wrote him. “For Claire, Anna is her addiction. Since addiction is an illness it cannot be resolved with reasoning.” Citing the AA slogan “Take what you like and leave the rest,” she advised him to identify what was definitely unacceptable and come to some kind of workable arrangement. Thus Roth’s letter to Bloom dated January 18, 1993, which she characterized in Doll’s House (without quoting it) as “a totally unwarranted attack on [her] daughter.” “We have a very precious marriage,” the attack began.
I love you dearly and I love dearly our life together. I know that what I am writing is going to cause you pain and I don’t want to cause you pain. But in the interest of preserving what’s most precious to me—your life with me and mine with you—I have to tell you candidly about something that distresses and pains me with a stress that won’t seem to go away.
Roth proposed a few “guidelines” for Anna’s visits, asking that she not use his study anymore (“I think my room and my desk should be respected as mine”), and suggesting he stay in Connecticut whenever she was in New York. As for Steiger’s occasional trips to the country, Roth hoped they could be limited henceforth to a single week per year: “What begins as a pleasant time ends as a difficult, edgy, and, for me, hollowly isolating time.” He concluded:
Claire, it’s no accident that we got married in America, where we were able at long last to live alone and intimately as two. For us, living alone and intimately as two middle-aged adults had been long, long overdue. . . . I refuse to have my life corroded with resentments spawned by my sense of being encroached on by or entailed with, even temporarily, a relationship that is not of my making . . . a relationship to which I am superfluous anyway and always have been because, in my judgment, it does not really admit of another human presence. . . .
Love, love, and love, / Philip
In Doll’s House, Bloom conceded it had been “many years” since she’d received one of Roth’s “written injunctions,” but at the time she reacted as if it were a matter of menacing routine: “No more letters!” she screeched, throwing the envelope to the floor. Roth departed for his studio and tried vainly to work, then phoned Joanna Clark (“one of my wisest friends”) and asked if he could come meet her for lunch in Princeton. At Lahiere’s, Clark recalled, Roth broke down and wept: “What can I do, Joanna? What can I do?” Bloom was also crying when he came home that night. She’d taken his letter to her analyst, who categorically agreed with Roth. “Good,” Roth thought with sublime relief, lying on the floor because of his aching back. “Good.” Then Bloom said: “But can’t she come one last time?” Roth felt chest pains and gasped, “Call Chuck” (Smithen, his cardiologist), who advised him to lie still for ten minutes and try to calm down. Meanwhile Bloom decided, as she wrote in Doll’s House, that “the only way to deal with his petty belligerence was to humor him and take no notice.”
Pain was the final factor in Roth’s breakdown. While on his Patrimony tour that winter and spring of 1993, he’d worn a back brace at the lectern and afterward, backstage, would gulp a couple of shots of vodka to get himself through the rest of the evening (he refused to take painkillers or sedatives because of the Halcion episode). Finally, on May 22, he drove two hours to western Massachusetts to receive an honorary degree from Amherst College; after sitting through an almost three-hour ceremony he thought he would faint with pain, and while driving home he pulled over and phoned Inga, begging her to go to his house and wait for him there, as she did. For the past few weeks Bloom had been in London with her daughter.
Home at last—with no further reading dates and only a vague idea of what (if anything) he wanted to write next—Roth planned a summer of rest and recuperation: swimming, hiking, reading, sleeping. “Then Claire came,” he remembered, “and she just began to cry. And she said, ‘I can’t stand it here. I hate it here. . . . I miss my daughter.’ ” This went on for three days or so, during which Roth “tanked”—overcome again by a constant, uncontrollable terror of being alone. Almost every morning the spectral, trembling man would descend the stairs, and his wife would take one look at him and burst into tears. “Just put your arms around me,” he remembered telling her. “And tell me, ‘I’m here, sweetheart, and everything’s going to be okay.’ And she’d do it, after I told her, like an actress.” Roth particularly remembered a day in July when he pretty much threw in the towel. Bloom had asked him to help her rehearse some passages from Cymbeline† that she was considering for her one-woman show, and (“nearly out of my wits with pain”) Roth followed her into his studio and listened, uncomprehending, for however long it went on. “Very good,” he intoned when it was over, whereupon she informed him that Anna would be coming to New York for six weeks‡ in the fall to study with a brilliant new teacher, Ruth Falcon, a great opportunity.
Roth sat pondering the six weeks of ghastly pain and panic he’d have to endure alone (mostly) in the country, and a phrase occurred to him that would become like a mantra in the days ahead: “My life is a problem I cannot solve.”
In Doll’s House, Bloom mentioned a journal she began keeping that summer, the better to fathom her husband’s “emotional swings”; on July 18, she accurately recorded that he seemed “afraid of being alone with [her].” Desperate for friends who wouldn’t automatically fidget or weep in his presence, Roth had asked Ross Miller and the Maneas to keep him company for a while. Norman arrived with his wife, Cella, and remembered finding his friend “weak as a child of twelve years old”: “Norman, I am lost,” Roth whispered. “I am totally lost.” As for Bloom, she seemed even more “unsettled, ravaged” (said Manea) than her husband, until her hysteria erupted in a curious way. “We three, and Ross, were sitting outside talking,” Roth wrote in a 2010 diary entry, “when Claire, prompted by nothing that could be seen, began to run crazily around the fields, her arms raised in the air and wailing uncontrollably.” (“Claire began to run around screaming, yes,” Manea confirmed.) Roth and the Maneas sat watching in silence, while Miller went off after her, trying to catch her and calm her down.
None of this would have surprised Philip’s brother. According to his third wife, Dorene Marcus, Sandy liked to remark of any actress who struck him as unstable (Judy Davis, say), “She’s like Claire.” When he arrived in Connecticut that July, he quickly sized up the situation and decided he needed to get his brother out of there.
The two had become close again once their first wives had died. After the kindhearted Trudy—who, again, despised Maggie and considered her brother-in-law “selfish”—succumbed to ovarian cancer in 1970, Philip went to stay awhile with Sandy in West Englewood, New Jersey. The widowed Sandy struck his brother as “lonely and lost,” so Philip and Barbara Sproul made a point of inviting him and his boys for gemütlich weekends (touch football, etc.) in the country. In 1976, Sandy moved to Chicago to become a creative director at Ogilvy & Mather, and within a decade he’d remarried, divorced, and, at age fifty-six, retired from advertising. Philip remembered a day in the mideighties when Sandy visited him at the Wyndham and announced (“look[ing] a little like the cat who ate the canary”) that he was taking acting lessons and intended to become an actor. Instead, he became a full-time painter—more or less for the fun of it, as he was always careful to stress: “I’m a journeyman who paints pretty well,” he told a journalist, “but no better than pretty well.” Philip was always a little bemused that his brother—who obsessively filled hundreds of nine-by-twelve sketch pads with skillful drawings over the course of his lifetime, whiling away afternoons at a mall or museum just to sketch people—chose, for his painting, big abstract acrylic canvases rather in the style of de Kooning. These however were good enough to rate a one-man show at SoHo’s Jack Gallery in 1988: “It’s Sandy’s paintings, not my books, that are autobiographical,” Philip told Time on that occasion, “—and embarrassing to all of us.”
“He only took pride in him, and that was lovely,” Sproul observed of Sandy’s attitude toward his little brother’s “big, big talent” versus his own “middling ability,” as he put it. Usually the two kept loosely in touch, chatting on the phone every few weeks, but Sandy never failed his brother in a crisis. In the past, when Philip needed help while he was alone in Connecticut, Sandy had dropped everything to care for him, and he did so again in July 1993 after a disturbing phone call. That first night in the country Sandy was awoken by the sound of his brother sobbing in the next room (at Philip’s request, Bloom was sleeping in “a far guest room”); Sandy lay beside him and Philip asked to be held. In her journal Bloom wrote that she felt like “an unwanted appendage,” and when Sandy asked her how she was coping with things, she admitted that she felt “helpless” and sometimes “almost hate[d]” Philip, who suddenly appeared in the doorway. Years later, reading of how Bloom had suspected he’d “engineered” the scene, Roth wrote: “Even when I am disabled both physically and emotionally and might seem to most observers unlikely to be able to engineer anything, I remain capable, in her estimation, of wielding my power over her and of ‘manipulat[ing]’ and ‘frighten[ing]’ her.”
After less than a week, Sandy had seen enough: “You can’t stay here,” he told Philip, “she wants to be the sick one. You’re coming to Chicago with me.” The next day, as Sandy was about to lead his fragile brother away, Bloom called them “two of the cruelest people in the world”—or, as Philip remembered it (giving the words to Eve Frame in I Married a Communist), “You are the worst people I have ever known!” Afterward she repented of her harshness to a visitor (Inga), who replied, “Not one of your best moments.”
SANDY LIVED IN A residential tower on Lake Shore Drive, and Philip immediately felt better there. That first night they went to dinner with Sandy’s companion, Dorene (the couple wouldn’t marry until 2001), who, unlike Sandy’s second wife, knew Philip’s work and found him delightful. Philip became lively and talkative, and even ate with decent appetite for the first time in weeks—but he slept poorly, and was depressed again when he woke up. Dick Stern paid a visit, and while they strolled around the downstairs gardens, Roth clung to his friend and said, “Are you sure you love me? Am I all right?”
Ross Miller happened to be in Chicago, and one day while they walked to lunch Roth decided it was time to kill himself. He stopped on the sidewalk and told Miller to go ahead without him. Surmising the worst—that Roth planned to jump from the top of his brother’s building—Miller said (in effect) that if Roth was planning to do what Miller suspected, he’d have to do it in front of him. “It was a stunning confrontation and it frightened me,” said Roth, who was persuaded instead to phone a psychiatrist he’d occasionally consulted over the years, Bill Frosch. A few minutes later Frosch called back: he’d found a place for Roth at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, where a friend of his named Bloch§ was medical director. The next day, August 3, Sandy flew back east with his brother, then drove him an hour north to Silver Hill, and hugged him goodbye outside Bloch’s office.
“How did I get from Chancellor Avenue School to here?” Roth wondered that first night in the Intensive Care Room; what had become of that brash lad who’d skipped two terms and dazzled the mothers of Weequahic as a caped Columbus? Anxious to escape, Roth complained about his room to Bloch, who walked him over to a separate, all-women’s residence and offered him a big white room under the eaves. This, Roth thought, was more like it: “a haven.” Avishai, an early visitor, remembered the contented smile that came over Roth’s face (“as if he were the happiest little boy in the world”) every time the nurse knocked on his door—“Mr. Roth?”—and made sure he was all right.
Aaron Asher brought him a radio with a CD player and a collection of classical music, mostly Bach, to listen to while he soaked in a hot bath to relieve his aching back. Indeed, it was Roth’s physical misery that received the most urgent attention: a doctor prescribed an anti-inflammatory (Voltaren) that wouldn’t hurt his stomach, and made sure he got at least four weekly sessions of physical therapy—this along with psychiatric group meetings (both coed and men-only), a “coping strategies” session after lunch, and an elective “practicum” (swimming in Roth’s case). Twice weekly he met one-on-one with Bloch, who spared him the “Freudian shit,” as Roth was happy to note; mainly it was a matter of finding the right mix of medications—Klonopin for anxiety, Prozac for depression, and a bit of lithium as an activator.
Perhaps the most therapeutic aspect of Silver Hill, for Roth, was an almost cozy sense of communal malaise. At the end of the day, he liked chatting on the porch with four or five women patients, who discussed their terrible marriages and whatnot, every so often sighing, “It’s hopeless.” Nobody looked at him funny; they nodded with serene comprehension when he spoke of his wish for oblivion—a wish mitigated somewhat by visits from Inga, who always brought a little gift (sweater, socks, a toilet kit) and, after a jolly dinner, would return to Roth’s room and do her best to bring him to climax despite lurking nurses and anorgasmic Prozac. “You know, you say terrible things about your wife,” one of the women patients remarked, “but I see you having dinner with her and you seem to enjoy each other.” Roth smiled: “That wasn’t my wife.”
Bloom was in London, and he grew angrier with her almost by the hour. Inga, for one, couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor woman—a friend, after all. By then Bloom could do no right in Roth’s eyes. At one point she’d suggested they go to a spa together, and ever after Roth would grumble, “A spa?! What the fuck does she think a spa’s gonna do . . .?” That first Friday at Silver Hill he got a call from his wife, who’d just returned to New York and proposed a visit; Roth (“angry, remote”) vetoed the idea, refusing to see her except in the presence of Dr. Bloch, who wasn’t on duty until Sunday. Roth hung up, then called back and asked her to bring him a few changes of underwear (“So maybe I am his wife after all,” she wrote in her journal).
Bloom would always claim to be flummoxed by her husband’s sudden disaffection, wistfully surmising with interviewers like Charlie Rose that it was due to “some kind of a breakdown.” When Bloch asked her, before Roth arrived for their three-way meeting on August 8, whether she understood why he was so mad at her, she answered (doubtless in all sincerity) that she “hadn’t the faintest idea.” According to Doll’s House and Roth’s own account, he spent two hours (“hardly pausing for breath”) coldly trying to enlighten her. Among other grievances, he mentioned her tendency to panic during his illnesses; she replied that she’d “taken good care of him” during his knee operation, bypass, and two breakdowns. “I am sorry to disillusion you on that point,” he said. “You were no help to me whatever.” Finally he came to the crux: if Anna still planned to study in New York for six weeks (or three months, as the case may be), Roth wanted to terminate the marriage. “Look at her!” he said to Bloch, when she bolted from the room. “She’s always running away.”
After a few more unsatisfactory meetings at Silver Hill, Bloom flew to Toronto and on to Salzburg, where her daughter had a singing engagement. Mother and daughter then traveled to a movie shoot in Dublin, where Dr. Bloch got hold of Bloom almost the moment she checked into her hotel. His patient had requested the sole use of their New York apartment for six months after his discharge; he didn’t want to be alone in the country (nor with Bloom in either place), and proposed to give her five thousand dollars a month to stay at the Wyndham or find a furnished apartment. Next Inga called, begging Bloom to accede to Roth’s wishes lest he end up killing himself while alone in Connecticut. “I think Philip is using [Inga] to manipulate me,” Bloom wrote in her journal, “but I have to take what she says on good faith—maybe Philip is in danger.”
Roth, meanwhile, was released from Silver Hill on August 20, and at first seemed fine. Judith Thurman stayed with him in Connecticut for a week, joining him for swims and long walks, while Roth spent mornings in his studio going over a few sketchy pages of what would become Sabbath’s Theater. He awoke without dread, and was even his old antic self at a dinner party chez Inga, where he regaled guests with the lighter side of life at Silver Hill. A little more than two weeks passed before he “went nuts” again: By then Joanna Clark was keeping him company, and one night she stood watching while he wandered outside and began screaming “WHERE IS SHE? WHERE IS SHE . . .?!” “You have to go back to the hospital,” Clark told him when he came back inside, and so he did.
When Roth returned to Silver Hill on September 8, he asked for Bloch’s assurance that he wouldn’t put Roth in the locked ward, but Bloch regretfully did so anyway. “That’s when I talked to myself,” Roth remembered, “and I said, ‘You are gonna do everything they tell you to do, and you are gonna get out of here whole. But the party’s over. You’re getting rid of this woman.’ ” On a list of twelve “Goals after Discharge,” Roth wrote “YOU BET” next to the ninth: “Change the environment you are returning to, to less stressful.” When Thurman came to visit, Roth asked her to see Bloom in New York and calmly repeat his proposal for separate living quarters during the first six months following his discharge. What he didn’t know—until Bloom’s letter to him dated October 25—was that Bloom was then in the midst of selling her London town house (“Who in her right mind would do such a thing at such a moment?” he wondered), which might help to explain her extreme reaction to Thurman’s turn as emissary. For a few minutes the women sipped tea and chatted, then Thurman repeated Roth’s request; Bloom sat primly twitching for a moment, then (“literally like zero to sixty”) burst into tears and began screaming, “What about me? What about me?” “I sort of backed out toward the door,” Thurman recalled.
A few days later Roth enlisted yet another woman friend, Janet Malcolm, to phone his wife and plead his case. Bloom responded with a faxed letter, gently imploring Roth simply to tell her what he wanted in his own words; she would love him in any case, she wrote, but she was in a miserable predicament and needed “protection.” “My dearest friend of seventeen years,” Roth replied, quoting the same endearment she’d used for him, “the most loving thing you can do right now is to give me the time and the space that I require to put this terrible suicidal depression behind me and to find my [way] back to my life. . . .
I am not ready to resume our domestic life now—I need time and psychiatric help to prepare me for that. In the meantime you of course need protection. That is why I gave you my offer [i.e., $5,000 a month], which I hope you will accept so that I can come down to New York in October and begin my recovery.
I too find it difficult not to be able to talk to you on the telephone but I’m not at all sure that I feel strong enough yet.
Relieved by the sweet if rather passive-aggressive implication that Roth would be ready, possibly, at some point, to resume their life together, Bloom replied that she would start looking for an apartment immediately. Six months didn’t seem so long, she wrote, when there was something “so wonderful” to look forward to.
By the time she arrived at Silver Hill, however, on the eve of Roth’s departure (he’d shown immediate improvement on learning of her acquiescence), Bloom had changed her mind. The two were in his room about to go down for dinner, when Bloom sat opposite him and announced that she intended to stay “home” on West Seventy-seventh—or so Roth remembered; in Doll’s House and (more convincingly) in a letter she wrote around this time, Bloom claimed to have simply, wretchedly begged to be allowed to come back in two months rather than six. In either case Roth was struck dumb with anger. After glaring at her for “at least fifteen minutes,” said Bloom, they went to dinner and ate in silence. Then, back in his room, Roth sternly forbade her to renege on their agreement, and perhaps also said something about her poisoning him (according to Bloom) or at any rate his life. “At this she made a grotesque face,” Roth noted, “—as a child might make at Halloween to scare her little friends—wiggled her fingers at the sides of her ears, and began to scream.” (Many years later, Thurman made “the same Halloween face” for Roth while trying to describe how Bloom had reacted to her proposal about the six-month separation.) In Doll’s House, Bloom recounted how she’d fled the room and cried out for someone to help Philip, whereupon she was sedated by the nurse on duty; since Bloom had said something about wanting to die, the nurse (after a quick phone conference with Bloch) gave her pajamas and took her to the locked ward—the first visitor in Silver Hill history, or so Roth claimed, to be retained as a patient overnight (“Only Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain has a similar experience”). As for Roth, the nurse found him sitting calmly in his room; his blood pressure was extremely high, but it was better the next day—Yom Kippur—and he departed as planned. Inga’s husband drove him back to Warren, where Roth packed his things and went on to New York.