CHAPTER
Thirty-Nine
WITH SABBATH’S THEATER ROTH HAD “LET THE repellent in” with a vengeance, and during this era some thought he was becoming rather Sabbath-like in real life. When his German publisher neglected to seek his approval before proposing a different title for a paperback edition of The Facts,* Roth threatened to “come after them with a GUN”: “Why can’t a jew [sic] have his own title in Germany in 1994?” he faxed Wylie. “Can’t we ever be forgiven? Fuckers.” The publisher responded to Roth’s complaint in German (“Ich habe nun unseren Umschlaghersteller . . .”), which made him angrier still: “How do I know what the fuck they’re talking about? It’s written in that fucking language they so taught the world to love between 1939 and 1945. Tell them to go fuck themselves and write in fucking English so we know what the fuck they’re talking about.” He moreover demanded an apology “IN FUCKING ENGLISH,” then proposed (“ON THIRD FUCKING THOUGHT”) that Wylie find him a different German publisher—in Switzerland. Wylie decorously suggested they let a scolding note suffice, and thereupon informed the publisher that neither he nor Roth were able to read German, etc. Roth approved the note with a single provision: “SEND IT TO THEM IN FUCKING YIDDISH.”
He was almost as cranky toward his American publisher, Simon & Schuster, who hadn’t sent copies of Operation Shylock to the PEN/Faulkner judges, nor did they commend his winning the award with so much as a postcard. Simon & Schuster, in turn, was perhaps chagrined over the bath they’d taken on Roth’s three-book contract; in the event, Wylie declined their offer for Sabbath and showed the novel elsewhere. Nan Talese of Doubleday professed to admire Roth’s “all-out, life-embracing acceptance of Sabbath,” but, she added, “it is the marketplace we must contend with and I fear that most readers are not going to find SABBATH good company.” A few days later the book was sold to Roth’s very first book publisher, Houghton Mifflin, for $300,000—half of what Simon & Schuster had paid for each of his three preceding books, a sacrifice Roth was happy to make: “Imagine,” he wrote Solotaroff, “I proposed a jacket design [at Houghton] and wasn’t met by a barrage of objections from my marketing betters (who always turn out to know shit).” Better still, he wasn’t expected to do publicity. He was dismayed when the editor who bought the novel, John Sterling, left Houghton within a couple of months, but eventually became friends with the man’s replacement, Wendy Strothman, despite her coming from the “feminist” (Roth) Beacon Press and regarding Mickey Sabbath with distaste.
Roth usually considered Sabbath his own favorite among his novels—certainly the one he had the most fun writing, as he mined a misanthropic vein that had flourished amid his travails with Bloom. “The misanthropy is genuine,” he later remarked. “And a misanthrope can be a very funny fellow, so I learned.” While choosing a burial plot, the suicidal Sabbath notes the recurrence of the word “Beloved” and imagines a suitable gravestone for himself: “Morris Sabbath / ‘Mickey’ / Beloved Whoremonger, Seducer / Sodomist, Abuser of Women, / Destroyer of Morals, Ensnarer of Youth, / Uxoricide, / Suicide / 1929–1994.” Such a man might have demanded sixty-two billion dollars in restitution from a recalcitrant wife, or mocked a young woman (despite her being the best friend of his future stepdaughter) for waxing indignant at his sexual advances—a man whose anger “takes the form of amusement, mischief, satire, hijinks, mimicry, impersonation, self-mockery, self-caricature, self-sabotage, and sheer playfulness,” as Roth explained both Sabbath and himself. Martin Amis was one of the many who noted that Roth was “a divided self”—torn, like Portnoy, between altruism and perversity—but Sabbath “is the first time that Mr. Hyde has been given the floor.” “I have chosen to make art of my vices rather than what I take to be my virtues,” Roth said to Jack Miles, and nowhere is this desideratum more gloriously realized than in Sabbath, whose main regret is that he is not “loathsome, degenerate, and gross” enough. Thus he enlists his “sidekicker,” Drenka, to filch her teenage niece’s soiled underwear and press them to his lips, and likewise tries to abscond with panties belonging to his old friend Norman Cowan’s daughter, until the girl’s mother, whom Sabbath has tried to seduce, discovers them in his jacket along with a bag of crack.
Such lewdness would pall were it not inextricably linked with, and driven by, a profound sense of loss. For fifty years Sabbath has been haunted by nothingness—“Every third thought shall be my grave” reads the book’s epigraph, from The Tempest—ever since the death of his brother Morty, “the kindest older brother in the world,” who was shot down over the Philippines at age twenty. “The death of Morty sets the gold standard for grief,” said Roth, who saw his best friend from Weequahic, Marty Weich, burst into tears when he remembered, fifty years later, his brother’s death and their devastated parents. For Sabbath (if not for Dr. Weich), indulging in the repellent is the best, the only, revenge. “What a pathetic, outmoded old crank you are, Mickey Sabbath,” says Cowan, a theater producer of uncommon eloquence (the better to serve as another of Roth’s dialectical mouthpieces). “The discredited male polemic’s last gasp. . . . [Y]ou persist in quarreling with society as though Eisenhower is president!” When Cowan pronounces his friend’s isolation “horrifying,” Sabbath, undaunted, replies: “I don’t think you ever gave isolation a real shot. It’s the best preparation I know of for death.”
And death is at the heart of the “two best scenes” Roth ever wrote, as he saw it: Sabbath’s visit to his hundred-year-old cousin, Fish, and his farewell to Drenka on her deathbed. Roth often spoke of his “freedom” while writing Sabbath—a sense he could do no wrong, slipping in and out of Sabbath’s thoughts, the first and third person, dancing along a high wire between pathos and hilarity. Whispers of the novel’s comic tone persist in the late scene with Fish, but the overall mood has become somber: Sabbath is solicitous toward the old man, sweetly in awe of his lonely perseverance, even as he (Sabbath) contrives to steal a carton of Morty’s belongings that has found its way into Fish’s possession:
They were back together on the sofa holding hands. And he has no idea who I am. No problem stealing the carton. . . .
“I think, when I think of dying,” Fish happened to be saying, “I think I wish I was never born. I wish I was never born. That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Cause death, death is a terrible thing. . . .”
Just how terrible Sabbath realizes when he opens the carton, afterward, on what would have been Morty’s seventieth birthday, and finds everything that materially remains of his brother’s brief span on earth—photos, his track letter, the flag that had been draped over his coffin when his burned and mutilated body was returned from the Philippines. Sabbath’s suffering at that moment is “the passionate, the violent stuff, the worst, invented to torment one species alone, the remembering animal, the animal with the long memory. And prompted merely by lifting out of the carton and holding in his hand what Yetta Sabbath had stored there of her older son’s.”
While Drenka lies dying of ovarian cancer—amid drainage bags full of her waste, her torso emaciated and her legs bloated with edema—the couple tenderly remember her malapropisms (“I pledge a legion to the flag”; “nuts and bulbs”) and the joy of pissing on each other in their little woodland stream. Some think Roth’s foot slips a little here, and elsewhere, while treading the novel’s narrow, “preposterone”-fueled path (“To his left,” as Amis put it, “the Scylla of schlock; to his right, the Charybdis of pornography”). “The pissing-on-me-on-you-on-the-grave has an elaborate sentimentality which made me (an old lady) cringe a little,” Joanna Clark wrote, with her usual frankness. But for Roth, as for Sabbath, the violation of taboos in the company of one’s beloved is the very essence of tenderness—an invigorating épater to a cruel and uncomprehending world. In the end, a bereft Sabbath seems about to fulfill his death wish when Drenka’s son, a loutish state trooper, catches him pissing on Drenka’s grave; rather than shooting or beating him to death, however, the man drives Sabbath into the woods and kicks him out of the squad car, “with no one to kill him except himself. . . . And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.”
Understandably, Roth was warier than ever of what critics would say of his latest, filthiest, most beloved of books. He had particular reason “to live in fear of Ms. Kakutani’s original mind,” as he wrote Bellow, since one of the scores he’d endeavored to settle in Sabbath was with the young Times reviewer who, he thought, had tarred his previous novel with a pretty broad brush. Sabbath, who hates the Japanese for killing his brother, affects to fumble the Michiko Kakutani–like name of Dean Kimiko Kakizaki, who fires him in the wake of a phone-sex scandal with one of his students: “Kakizomi. Kazikomi. Who could remember their fucking names. Who wanted to.” Mickey Sabbath, You’re No Portnoy, read the headline of Kakutani’s review: “Whereas Portnoy’s attacks of conscience coupled with his rage to revolt gave that novel an exuberant comic energy, Sabbath’s plodding pursuit of defiance lends Sabbath’s Theater a static and claustrophobic air, resulting in a novel that’s sour instead of manic, nasty instead of funny, lugubrious instead of liberating.”
But this was not representative of the novel’s mostly euphoric reception, including a rave in The New York Review of Books from Roth’s favorite critic, Frank Kermode, who declared Sabbath “among the most remarkable novels in recent years. With his Rabelaisian range and fluency, his deep resources of obscenity, his sense that suffering and dying can be seen as unacceptable though inevitable aberrations from some huge possible happiness, Roth is equipped for his great subject—one that was treated in their own rather different ways by the authors of Genesis and Paradise Lost.” Kermode made the point that both Sabbath and King Lear (the latter a kindred soul whom Sabbath portrays on stage and subway) deplore moral hypocrisy and its attendant forms of justice—the beadle lashing the whore, says Lear, whom he “hotly lust’st to use”: “It is this justice that Sabbath rages against,” wrote Kermode; “and so, with all his characteristic ironies and reservations, does the author of this splendidly wicked book.”
WHILE WRITING SABBATH, Roth refined his work routine with two crucial acquisitions: a stand-up desk, which spared his back a little and behooved him to walk around when he got stuck, and a word processor, which he found wonderfully conducive to revision and “a bit more company than the typewriter”—which is not to say he was tempted by the nascent internet. Almost ten years would pass before Roth bought a second computer for that purpose (and even longer before he bothered with email), and for the rest of his life he did most of his actual writing on the first, a Dell 466/L with a quaintly minuscule eight megabytes of RAM. “You’ve got a word processor!” Updike congratulated him. “Welcome to this wonderful world. You’ll be able to double your output, delighting your friends and confounding your foes.”
He would need every advantage for his next project—a nice riposte to Kermode’s rather waggish qualm that Roth had all but exhausted the possibilities of literate obscenity (“further outrage now seems close to impossible”). By early fall 1995, Roth was already forty thousand words into his new novel and hadn’t used the word “fuck” once—a polarity harking back to Philip Rahv’s “redskin” and “paleface” dialectic in American letters, not to say Roth’s own divided nature. Roth, an urban Jewish redskin “to the candy store and the borscht belt born,” had been semicivilized by the academy into a cultural amalgam he dubbed “redface”: “To my mind,” Roth had written in 1973, “being a redface accounts as much as anything for the self-conscious and deliberate zigzag that my own career has taken, each book veering sharply away from the one before, as though the author were mortified at having written it as he did and preferred to put as much light as possible between that kind of book and himself.” One sign that he’d exhausted the pleasure of Sabbath’s company was his visceral reaction to the sight of Sabbath’s Theater on the bedside table of Julia Golier’s sweet Catholic mother: “I felt so ashamed,” said Roth.
The wholesome hero of Roth’s present book, Seymour “Swede” Levov, had gestated in his imagination for more than twenty years. When Alan Lelchuk informed him, in 1973, that a prominent critic’s daughter had been part of the radical antiwar movement, Roth remarked on “what a novel that might make, to trace the journey of [the critic’s family] through the decade.” For Roth, it was imperative that his own novel’s radical terrorist (a word that didn’t exist in his vocabulary back then) be a daughter rather than a son. Because women protesters in those days weren’t in danger of being drafted and killed, they possessed a kind of ineffable “purity to their rage” that fascinated Roth. And while he was intrigued by the critic’s daughter, his main model for Merry Levov was Kathy Boudin, the daughter of an activist left-wing lawyer whose clients had included Fidel Castro. Roth had met Leonard Boudin at one of the Schneiders’ parties in the sixties, and on March 6, 1970, across the street from the Schneiders, four Weather Underground members had blown up a town house (at 18 West Eleventh Street) while making bombs. Kathy Boudin and a friend staggered away from the rubble and disappeared, while the decapitated torso of Diana Oughton wasn’t found until four days later.
“LEBOW was not given to daydreaming about what he didn’t have”—reads the first line of the draft Roth began in 1974, shortly after finishing My Life as a Man—“most likely because for most of his life he had had everything he most wanted.” In this ur-version, tentatively titled How the Other Half Lives, Lebow is a decent but “dull and boring” Everyman, versus the more complicated paragon that is Swede Levov; otherwise, the core episodes of American Pastoral are mostly in place. By page three of the typescript, Lebow’s daughter Merry is already a stuttering eleven-year-old in love with her father: “Daddy, kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother,” she says, after an outing on the beach, and Lebow angrily replies “N-n-no”—then, mortified, kisses her. “I thought, ‘What if he does it?’ ” Roth said of that linchpin moment, remembering a similar episode between himself and Maggie’s daughter. Also in Other Half (one page later!), Merry—“like some poor innocent in a fairy story who had been tricked into drinking a terrible potion”—becomes a stout, ungainly sixteen-year-old, mocked at school as “Ho Chi Lebow” because of her fanatical rage over the Vietnam War; on page six she blows up the Princeton Faculty Club bathroom, killing a janitor, and her father is left to wonder—forever—whether his wholly uncharacteristic lapse, when Merry was eleven, turned her into a terrorist.
Roth started over in the first person (“Who is the other half? . . . I am a parent, a husband, a manufacturer, an American, and a Jew”), and toyed mysteriously with incorporating some aspect of his Anne Frank obsession, trying such titles as A Businessman’s Sorrow (Anne Frank in America) and The Diary of Anne Frank’s Contemporary. Here, too, as in Pastoral, Merry the daughter emerges from the radical underground, years after the bombing, as an emaciated, veil-wearing Jain who works at a dog and cat hospital. But Roth couldn’t imagine the world of her father—a “moderate, kindly, decent” cipher—beyond these few crucial scenes. For the next two decades, between each book, he’d pore over the seventy or so pages of false starts and wrack his brain; but it was only after spending two years with Mickey Sabbath that a worthy antithesis occurred to him: “American Pastoral got going when the Viet Nam book became the Swede Levov book,” Roth wrote for the Franklin Library. “Whatever abundance of life this book may possess, arises from a head-on collision between those two words—‘The Swede’—and my imagination.” The nickname was derived from Seymour “Swede” Masin, a member of the Weequahic class of 1938—a legendary athlete considered, like Roth’s hero, “the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews.” Taking only Masin’s nickname and athletic prowess, Roth imagined the rest of Swede Levov’s life—the gentile wife (a former Miss New Jersey), successful glove-making business, dream house in a rural exurb, troubled but beloved daughter, and a terrible portion of the national tragedy.
More and more, Roth insisted on transcending the merely personal—the “dwarf drama” of one alter ego after another—the better to explore “the world of massive historical pain instead of this pain in the neck,” as Zuckerman puts it in The Anatomy Lesson. “Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world,” Roth said in 1982, “reveal the real world as it is now. I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.” The Prague Orgy gave a glimpse of the historical pain coveted by Zuckerman and his creator, whereas the canvases of The Counterlife and Operation Shylock were nothing if not sprawling—albeit dominated, still, by the “mirror games” (Kakutani) involving a Roth-like protagonist. Meanwhile he envied Updike’s all-but-seamless incorporation of elaborate research, especially in the Rabbit novels—the way he became an expert on various nonliterary lives: “His hero is a Toyota salesman,” Roth marveled of Rabbit Is Rich. “Updike knows everything about being a Toyota salesman. . . . I’m going to give up writing.” Roth was actually a scrupulous post hoc researcher: Once he’d completed a draft or two, unconstrained by facts, he’d make sure the basic verisimilitude was sound. For The Anatomy Lesson he spent a few days shadowing an oncologist at St. Francis Hospital in Waterbury, and, as mentioned, he traveled to Amsterdam during the seventies and toured the Anne Frank House, along with her school and the streets she would have known. As Roth explained his method, “You’re not ‘inspired’ by these people, it’s quite the opposite: you write the thing and then you look for validation somewhere.”
In November 1974, while casting about for some way to flesh out his hero’s identity as a “manufacturer,” Roth met the father of a Woodstock friend (the book publisher Peter Mayer), who invited Roth to tour his glove-making factory in Brooklyn. Roth had a “terrific visit” and became fascinated with every aspect of the business. Someone put him in touch with the manager of a leather tannery in Gloversville, New York—the heart of the (dying) glove-making industry—where Roth reveled in the “stink and dyes and water rushing everywhere”; afterward his host introduced him to a retired, old-time leather cutter, who made a pair of gloves for Roth, from scratch, that he cherished the rest of his life. “The more I learned about gloves in Gloversville,” Roth wrote about the origins of his novel, “the more I realized it represented something to me that was important to this book. It was about an era, about something else that’s gone.” Roth would always take pride in the fictional use to which he finally put his research, twenty years after that first trip to Gloversville. “I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do,” Swede tells the baby-faced Rita Cohen, Merry’s underground accomplice, who pretends to be a Wharton student writing her thesis on the Newark leather industry. “We’re going to make you a pair of gloves and you’re going to watch them being made from start to finish.” After a virtuosic narrative seminar on the craft and milieu of glove making—the Swede momentarily distracted from his ceaseless misery—Rita Cohen reveals her true identity (“Boom!” Roth exclaimed, clapping his hands at the perfection of it): “She wants her Audrey Hepburn scrapbook,” says Rita of the lost Merry.
What was mainly “gone” after the sixties, for Roth, was the Newark of his childhood—a vanished Atlantis he eulogized in American Pastoral. During the eighties, when visiting his father, Roth would detour through Weequahic and gape at the desolation—wondering, of course, what to make of it in his fiction. “Newark was Prague,” he said. “Newark was the West Bank . . . a place that had a great historical fall.” A key aspect of Newark’s decline was the racial strife between black and white—particularly white Jews—given the gross disparity of economic opportunity; throughout the fifties and sixties, blacks came to occupy what had once been immigrant slums, while Jews deserted the city en masse for the suburbs. The Newark-born poet Amiri Baraka called the violence of 1967—in which he was charged but acquitted of weapons possession and inciting to riot—a “historical inevitability.” This, after all, was a city where 52 percent of the population was black, whereas the police force was 90 percent white and only a single elected official was black. The fuse was lit on July 12, 1967, when white policemen beat a black cabdriver, John W. Smith, for allegedly resisting arrest after a minor traffic violation. Residents of a high-rise housing project, Hayes Homes, witnessed the police dragging Smith into the station, and black Newarkers went on a rampage, looting and setting fires. Some businesses were spared, at first, when signs were hung like the signs that Levov’s devoted black forelady, Vicky, hangs in the windows of Newark Maid: “Most of this factory’s employees are NEGROES.” As in the novel, however, white snipers soon made a point of shooting out windows where such signs were displayed. By the time the riots subsided, 1,058 businesses were damaged, and much of the city’s public housing was in ruins. Jewish-owned businesses had been targets for particular violence, and some considered the riots a pogrom; within two years the once thriving community of Newark Jews had dwindled to a tenth of its original size. Finally, in 1975, Harper’s magazine ranked American cities on the basis of census data in twenty-four categories: “The city of Newark stands without serious challenge as the worst of all.”
Beginning with American Pastoral, Roth’s right-hand man for local research was a librarian and Newark city historian, Charles Cummings. Roth adored Cummings—a “square, gay, and good-hearted” fellow, who never once failed him in any of his myriad requests. “You wouldn’t be interviewing me if it weren’t for Charles Cummings,” Roth remarked to his biographer, referring to the hundreds of little flourishes he owed to Cummings’s assiduity, such as the tunic and “NP”-emblazoned saddlecloth that Newark police and their horses wore during the war era of The Plot Against America. One winter day in 1995, Roth and Cummings spent hours looking for just the right building on which to model the Levov glove factory—“a smoke-darkened brick pile fifty years old and four stories high on Central Avenue and 2nd Street” that, once found, Cummings photographed from ten different angles.
Perhaps the most pleasant aspect of Roth’s research, however, was by way of providing the exhaustive background for Dawn Levov’s participation in the 1949 Miss America pageant. Roth had befriended the actor Ron Silver (narrator for a number of Roth’s audiobooks, including Portnoy and, later, American Pastoral), who gave him the phone number of a girlfriend, Tawny Godin Little, Miss America 1976. Little put Roth in touch with the more age-appropriate Miss America 1951, Yolande Betbeze Fox, who agreed to visit Roth at his New York apartment and bring her pageant scrapbook. Roth was smitten: Fox, an opera singer, was funny, smart, and still stunning in her midsixties; the first Miss America to balk at posing in a bathing suit, she later devoted herself to progressive causes and studied philosophy at the New School. “In 1950,” she smiled, when Roth kissed her goodbye on the cheek, “you wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
BY THE TIME ROTH WON his second National Book Award, for Sabbath’s Theater, winners were no longer announced in advance, and Roth had sensibly assumed his chances were slim. The chairman of the fiction jury, Thomas McGuane, admitted that his wife had thrown Roth’s novel “across the room after the first 60 pages,” while another judge, Erica Jong, said Sabbath “won despite its subject matter, which people on the committee universally found repellent, but which it transcends to become a meditation on mortality like no other.” Amid a buzz of adverse comment, Roth was a no-show for the November 15 ceremony at the Plaza, and Wylie explained that his client had bronchial flu. In fact a death threat of sorts had been forwarded by William Pritchard of Amherst College, whose admiring review of Sabbath for the Sunday New York Times had provoked an anonymous letter addressed to him at the “Department of Sycophancy and English”:
Only a cheap little asskissing two-bit fucking “English professor” would have stooped to calling this Jew bastard’s latest pile of dog shit “his richest and most rewarding.” Or did the slimy kike’s fascination with jerking himself off all his life give you the cozy feeling that you had found a fellow marathon masturbator to suck off in print? . . . Fags like you should be destroyed with concentrated AK-47 fire. That remedy would restore American higher education to what it once was. Or help to.†
After consulting the FBI, Roth asked Conarroe to attend the ceremony and, if necessary, deliver a brief acceptance speech on his behalf: “ ‘I have written a wicked book,’ ” Roth had written, quoting Melville on the subject of Moby-Dick, “ ‘and feel spotless as a lamb.’ ”
An even more menacing development was news of a “ ‘healing’ session between [Inga] and Claire,” as Joanna Clark reported to Roth in a November 2, 1995, note. Neither Clark nor Roth had any notion of the enormity of what lay ahead, though Clark deplored “the culture of victimhood, the great American Oprahdom” that, as she saw it, informed these women’s sensibilities. Bloom would later tell Charlie Rose that she’d been “nearly finished” with her memoir when she learned the truth (or “The Truth,” as she titled her final chapter) about Roth’s affair with their mutual friend and neighbor. Inga doesn’t recall Bloom using a tape recorder or taking notes while they chatted that day at Inga’s town house, and later, when Bloom faxed her the relevant pages, Inga let them pass even though she hardly recognized herself in the “calm, undemanding” (“STAY AWAY FROM ME!!!!!!”) Erda. Roth, needless to say, would also find the portrait somewhat out of focus: “Telling this story (if that is the story [Inga] told) she was able to confess to Claire of an affair lasting a year or two which she was drawn into like Florence Nightingale because I was in need, rather than to admit to the mischievous, audacious affair of 15”—actually more like eighteen—“years duration which provided the model for Drenka’s affair with Sabbath.”
A measure of Roth’s self-involvement, and/or a kind of selective naiveté, was his inability to grasp at the time that Bloom meant to do him harm. (“Who would want to hurt Amasa Delano?” he’d mock himself many years later, paraphrasing Melville’s “Benito Cereno”: “Who would murder Amasa Delano?” wonders Amasa Delano, unwittingly menaced by mutinous slaves aboard the San Dominick.) Mia Farrow remembered that he still kept a picture of Bloom in his studio, and often spoke tenderly of the way he’d tried and tried, always, to coax this terribly insecure person into giving her best performance. He laughed when Manea worriedly related a rumor that Bloom was writing about their relationship: “Norman, she cannot write,” said Roth, who assumed such a book would be a sequel to Limelight and After—perhaps about “the interesting nature of a marriage between an actress and a writer,” he surmised, “which was not without precedent (Chekhov and Olga Knipper).” After all: How could such a book be scurrilous? What about the money he’d given her? The teleplays he’d written? The endless rehearsing and other career assistance? What about that genial meeting at Sarabeth’s, and the friendly notes that followed?
Roth spent almost the entire summer of 1996 in Connecticut, working on American Pastoral, with Golier and occasionally Ross Miller his only weekend visitors. Neither friend was apt to hear the Manhattan gossip about the galleys of Leaving a Doll’s House that were already circulating. Still, it appears Roth at least got the gist of David Streitfeld’s piece in The Washington Post on August 30: Doll’s House, Streitfeld revealed, “is in large part about Philip Roth: master novelist and master manipulator, a deeply troubled fellow who likes to make his loved ones part of his madness.” When Streitfeld described the book’s contents to him, Conarroe assayed a loyal and politic response: “Claire is a wonderful person and a great actress, but not necessarily a totally accurate observer. I hope anyone who reads this book will read it not only with a grain of salt, but a whole tablespoonful.” One of the book’s dedicatees, however, assured Streitfeld that her friend Claire was all but incapable of even the mildest exaggeration: “She’s an amazingly accurate reporter,” said Francine du Plessix Gray.
On September 3, Roth sent a terse memo to his closest friends, giving out his new telephone numbers in New York and Connecticut: “THESE NUMBERS ARE UNLISTED. PLEASE DO NOT GIVE THEM TO ANYONE.” He also castigated Conarroe for talking to Streitfeld, though of course his friend had only meant to be helpful; nevertheless Roth had repeatedly asked him and others not to cooperate with the media in any form, especially during his breakup with Bloom.
Though Roth clearly had at least secondhand knowledge of the Streitfeld piece, he later claimed he hadn’t twigged to the true nature of Bloom’s memoir until September 17, when he was in New York to see his physical therapist, Lori Monson. As he was leaving, she remarked, “I wouldn’t look at the Times today if I were you.” Puzzled, he walked to the City Athletic Club (“Jewish guys,” Roth glossed) on Fifty-fourth and Sixth to take a swim, relaxing afterward in the sauna. Two men were expostulating outside the door—“Is he gonna let her get away with this shit?”—when Roth came out to say hello. “What you gonna do about her?” one man asked. “Who’s ‘her’?” “You know what I’m talking about!” Roth didn’t, though he declined to pursue the matter then and there. He said goodbye and proceeded up Central Park West toward his apartment on Seventy-seventh. Along the way, at last, he got the picture. Coming toward him was his and Bloom’s old friend Barbara Epstein; expecting the usual hug and hello, Roth was startled when the woman hurried past him without a word. At this point he thought to buy the Times. Claire Bloom Looks Back in Anger at Philip Roth, read the headline of an article, by Dinitia Smith, about Bloom’s forthcoming memoir. Roth’s blurry scan of the first few sentences picked out key phrases: “self-centered misogynist . . . the gossip is considerable. . . .”
He stopped there and dumped the newspaper into the trash; then he went to his apartment, packed a few clothes, got his car out of the garage, and drove an hour and a half to the Jersey Shore—stopping en route to visit his parents’ graves and pull himself together. “I thought: ‘This whole life has been dedicated to serious matters. . . . And that I should wind up in the fucking New York Times saying “misogynist” and who knows what else is in there. And also there’s the book to come . . .’ ” Roth took a room at a bed-and-breakfast in Spring Lake (a few miles south of his childhood haunts in Bradley Beach), and, after a day or so, left messages for Sandy, Wylie, and Golier (the last, under the circumstances, was frantic with worry by then), letting them know he’d gone away for a bit and was fine. For the next four days he did nothing but “walk and dive, walk and dive,” eating his meals on the dock at Ollie Klein’s in Belmar. At night he listened to the ocean a block away from his room. “I lay on the bed and I thought ‘They can’t touch you. They can’t touch you.’ In one day I was over it. I was centered.” Which is to say, he was soon ready to collect his things in New York and hole up in Connecticut for a long while, working and seeing nobody but Julia and Ross; in a larger sense, he never got over it.
IN HER PREFACE TO Leaving a Doll’s House, Bloom described her marriage to Roth as “the most important relationship of [her] life” (not to be confused with her greatest love, who, she noted on page 93, was Richard Burton‡). As Bloom recognized when she first saw Chekhov’s Three Sisters, at age twelve, certain women are apt to spend their lives in pursuit of a “lost father,” no matter how “tyrannical” such a figure tends to be. Ultimately, like Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House, Bloom would be free of the final and most darkly formidable of the many father figures in her life, but the journey was painful, protracted, and very repetitive. “You have already had Portnoy’s complaint,” Gore Vidal advised her back in 1975, referring to her recent divorce from a man who’d exploited her sexually and otherwise, Hilly Elkins. “Do not involve herself with Portnoy.” In lucidly rueful retrospect, Bloom realized her friend had been right—a conclusion she might have reached in the beginning, on the basis of Roth’s novels, which “provided all one needed to know” about the kind of philandering, “Machiavellian” fiasco the author proved to be. Such, anyway, was Leaving a Doll’s House.
Most of the reviewers were sympathetic to the story Bloom told. The word “harrowing” recurred a lot. Marion Winik wrote, in the Los Angeles Times (“Mrs. Portnoy’s Complaint”), that there was “nothing funny” about the “mess” that is Philip Roth—who, it so happened, was Winik’s “favorite living writer,” though she was hardly surprised by his human failings: “Tall, moody, self-absorbed intellectuals with their sardonic insights have long been a disappointment to me in the romance department.” Perhaps the most wholehearted affirmation came from Patricia Bosworth in the Times Book Review. Naturally she found the book “harrowing,” though she commended Bloom’s effort to be “fair to Mr. Roth, perhaps too fair. And too often she portrays herself as a victim, which is exasperating; she obviously is very strong; otherwise, she would not have survived.”
Daphne Merkin, however, writing in The New Yorker, wondered at Bloom’s lack of “any sense of moral accountability. . . . In her own eyes, she remains forever a passive being fatally attracted to men who issue demonic commands she has no choice but to obey.”§ As for Bloom’s alleged fairness despite her victimhood, Merkin noted that Roth and others had proved quite useful to her career: “One can discern, through the pious gloss Bloom puts on the events of her life, the shrewd maneuverings of a stage brat”—a sentiment Zoë Heller echoed more bluntly in the London Review of Books: “beneath the guise of a bashed butterfly, a scorpion.”
And yet, in his feature article for New York magazine (cover caption: “A Hell of a Marriage”), Peter J. Smith pointed out that Bloom’s “most striking” traits were “her obvious kindness, sincerity, and eagerness to please. . . . [T]his blistering and ultimately very sad account exposes the artist as a spectacularly troubled and manipulative man, prone to recurring somatic and mental illness; someone who, in the words of one of Bloom’s friends, ‘is basically impossible, and should not have relationships.’ ” As evidence of her vaunted fairness, Bloom pronounced the prepublication Times piece “vile” because it gave a false impression of her book’s harshness, when in fact she’d tried very hard to emphasize “that there were good times as well as bad, that it was a long and splendid relationship that in the end was marred.” Smith added: “Later an acquaintance of Bloom’s suggests that she was ‘having you on,’ claiming that Bloom, when informed about the Times’s early and unusual coverage, was ‘chortling.’ ”
The nadir was a spot about Bloom on the prime-time Dateline NBC. Roth was alerted by his Silver Hill psychiatrist, Dr. Bloch, who phoned to warn him that he’d just escorted a film crew off the grounds when they asked his permission to shoot “Roth’s room”; the crew was now filming from a nearby road. This was followed by a letter from Dennis Murphy:
I’m an NBC News reporter with the network’s Dateline program and over the weekend, in London, Claire gave us a taped interview, which we expect to air in a couple of weeks. Had there been an 11th chapter, Smilesburger’s whisperers couldn’t have done a better job in the loshon hora [“evil tongue,” i.e., derogatory speech] department.
Claire believes that you will never respond to her book or the accompanying publicity and though you are one who clearly knows how to be silent, patient and unprovoked in the most unsettling circumstances, I hope she’s wrong?
Would you consider a videotaped interview? . . .
“He’d do it to me,” Claire tells us.
Would you?
Roth didn’t reply, though he belatedly retained a lawyer, Russell Brooks of Milbank Tweed, who read Doll’s House on his behalf (“for the sake of my health and sanity,” said Roth, “I didn’t want to”), and wrote a letter to Bloom, dated November 5, observing that her book was defamatory and demanding a retraction, absent which Roth had “authorized us to take whatever legal action is necessary.” Six days later, during her WNYC radio interview with Leonard Lopate, Bloom spoke with unwonted tenderness of her “marvelous marriage” to Roth, with whom she’d had “the best relationship of her life.” On the thirteenth Brooks sent a tape of this interview to an NBC lawyer, David Sternlicht, advising him to compare it with their own interview, “and then consider whether NBC News can rely on Ms. Bloom’s statements to Dateline to be accurate.” Roth’s former lover and Penn student, Laurie Geisler Donovan, was now a senior vice president and general counsel for the network; as she regretfully informed Roth over the phone, they’d discussed aborting the segment but decided it was too late to fill the November 15 slot.
“I was the victim of a dreadful accident,” Bloom announces at the beginning of her Dateline spot. “What caused it, I don’t know. It’s like being hit by a truck.” Flashing lights, a blaring car horn. “I despise what he did to me. I despise the person who did it.” An announcer explains: “It’s her thermonuclear dish-all about her ex-husband, Philip Roth, that has smart circles buzzing. . . . [Roth] is such a towering intellect, he could be the Michael Jordan of the American literary scene.” The actual interview builds with like subtlety to “the most shocking story” in Bloom’s book, when Roth handed her a letter demanding that her daughter move out. “No, sorry, got to stop there,” Bloom says, after a faltering attempt to discuss “the worst moment of [her] life”: “Can’t do this.” (“He might see it differently,” she breezily remarked of the Anna episode on WNYC. “That’s what happened, but he might have his own reasons that he would give you, I’m sure.”) “You’ve hit him with a hay-maker,” the Dateline interviewer congratulates her at last.
BLOOM [girlishly covering her mouth]: What’s a “haymaker”?
INTERVIEWER: It’s a full roundhouse punch that puts you back on your bum.
BLOOM: Oh, great! . . . That’s exactly the way I feel. He hit me with a haymaker; I fought back.
The day after the show, which Roth never watched, he went to the Cornwall Bridge general store to pick up his daily paper, and the store’s owner, Ed Baird, took him aside: “I didn’t believe those things they said about you, Phil. I know you, and I didn’t believe a word.”
Meanwhile Milbank Tweed had compiled a “Preliminary List of Possibly Defamatory Statements,” seventy-two in all, which, if false, were libelous. A few of these were highlighted in Brooks’s November 5 letter to Bloom:
■Mr. Roth is misogynic [sic] and has an innately hostile disposition toward women. These statements are patently false. . . .
■Mr. Roth demanded that you oust your daughter Anna from her family home in London to live in a student hostel in a poor and dangerous neighborhood [“one of the least salubrious,” Bloom had written] of London. In fact, your daughter left home to live in the London residence facility of her London college—the Guild Hall School of Music, and, when she did not like it, returned home several months later and lived on the top floor of the home with a friend.
■Mr. Roth made improper sexual advances to [Felicity]. This statement is utterly false.
■Mr. Roth suffered from a disease identified as “bipolar disorder.” This false and damaging statement appeared on page 178 of the galley proofs that you circulated to reviewers. . . .
If Bloom did not make a public retraction, Brooks concluded, Roth intended to recover damages against her “in an amount not less than $10 million.” (“He said, ‘How much do you want to sue her for, ten mill or twenty mill?’ ” Roth recalled. “And I said ‘Ten mill.’ Taking the high road.”)
In fact Bloom’s book never precisely described Roth as “misogynic,”¶ and then, too, “utterly false” is a stretch vis-à-vis whatever transpired between Roth and Felicity; but he fastened on Bloom’s explicit claim, in the galleys, that his struggle with “Halcion madness,” in 1987, “was the first manifestation of the symptoms that were later identified as bipolar disorder.” In 2008, Roth asked Bill Frosch, a psychiatrist he’d consulted for almost twenty years, to comment in writing on the validity of a bipolar diagnosis, and Frosch flatly denied that Roth had ever met DSM criteria for the illness: “I feel that I can say this with some confidence,” he wrote: “1. I know you well; and 2. I served on the American Psychiatric Association Task Force for DSM III, which still serves as the basis of the current diagnostic classification.” Two other psychiatrists, both familiar with Roth’s occasional bouts of unipolar depression, also denied he’d ever exhibited signs of mania. “It’s not an expression I would use, and I have no idea,” Bloom backpedaled during her November 11 interview (a few days after Brooks’s letter), when Lopate mentioned her reference to manic depression. He then asked about Roth’s Halcion madness. “That’s not being a manic-depressive,” said Bloom; “that’s being affected by dreadful drugs.”
In a 2013 email, Bloom claimed that she’d had “very good grounds” for her assertion of Roth’s supposed bipolar illness, “but it was agreed that these grounds were too feeble.” The very good (if too feeble) grounds were characterized as “a reliable source” in a rebuttal composed by Little, Brown’s general counsel, Carol Fein Ross, on November 12, 1996; nevertheless, Bloom had agreed to delete the reference. As for the rest of her allegedly defamatory statements, they were expressions of her “heartfelt” and “constitutionally protected opinions” and therefore not actionable, Ross concluded, on a deploring note:
[We] are disappointed that a writer of such exceptional talent and prominence would attempt to stifle someone else’s expression of opinion. . . .
It is regrettable that Mr. Roth is dismayed over the publication of Ms. Bloom’s book, as she had no intention of causing him harm. . . . Mr. Roth is a public figure who often writes about relationships, and, as such, there is public interest in information about relationships he has had. Because we have every confidence in Ms. Bloom’s work and do not believe it to be defamatory, we see no need for a public retraction.
As Roth remembered, “I had been virtually assured victory in the U.K.”—where libel laws are more stringent—“and Russell thought we had a pretty solid case in the U.S.” Roth had retained a firm of London solicitors, Harbottle & Lewis, and was briefly tempted to proceed, but first consulted friends whose judgment he trusted: Wylie, Miles, and Dr. Bloch. They all advised against it, and for the same reasons that doubtless would have dissuaded Roth in any case: “I did not want interminable conferences with lawyers and exhausting courtroom appearances and sleepless nights of arguing the case in my head to displace everything else in my life, beginning with my work, nor did I relish encountering the media coverage incited by a suit between the two of us.” Roth envisaged an ordeal akin to that of the ravaged litigants of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House: “Suffer any wrong that can be done you,” Dickens wrote of his chancery court, “rather than come here!” Besides, Roth liked to think Bloom’s book would go away soon enough, and meanwhile he could get on with his next two novels, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain (both about false accusation). “You know what Chekhov said when someone said to him ‘This too shall pass’?” Roth asked his biographer. “ ‘Nothing passes.’ Put that in the fucking book.”
FOR FIVE OR SIX MONTHS, Roth never ventured far from his Connecticut home, nor did he accept phone calls from New York. Golier found him “pretty distraught” and did her best to cheer him. The better to underline the point that Bloom’s book was but a passing blip in an otherwise happy and accomplished life, she pasted three or four sheets of paper together and devised an elaborate timeline, past and future, on which the all but invisible pinprick of Doll’s House was followed by honors and prizes galore (“I was not wrong,” she said). The “worst moment” that fall—for Golier—was returning to Grand Central after an especially arduous weekend of bucking Roth up (“Nobody cares! It’s going to be gone in ten seconds!”), and running smack into rows and rows of New York magazine with Roth and Bloom on the cover: “A Hell of a Marriage.”
Above all, perhaps, Roth was hurt by what seemed an almost universal willingness to accept Bloom’s account at face value. His friend Jack Miles noticed this too, and protested Patricia Bosworth’s review of Bloom’s book in the Sunday Times with a letter reminding its readers that “there are two sides to any divorce story. . . . In sum, what badly needs saying about this season’s succès de scandal is that no one knows how much of it is true. I can only regret that your reviewer didn’t say just that much and that little.” Certainly Roth would have liked to rebut the charge that he caddishly discarded “one woman after another”; among the women who’d discarded him, rather than vice versa, and remained friends all the same, was Barbara Sproul, who’d bumped into Bloom at a party shortly before Bloom’s divorce from Roth. “She went on about him being ‘unreasonable,’ ” Sproul remembered, “and I said I found him to be eminently reasonable.” Later Bloom’s complaint seemed all the richer in light of her “disgusting” book (“the day you get carted off to the bin doesn’t seem to be anyone’s fucking business except the most intimate of friends”), and Sproul lost no time writing Roth a letter:
I wanted you to hear it from somewhere other than your own inner voice: it ain’t so, and I am glad to say it. You are good and kind and generous and true and if you have any flaw, surface cynicism notwithstanding, it is that you are hopeful and faithful enough to think others are as well. If you have failed here it is only in the sense that your love—of Maggie first, and then of Claire—wasn’t enough to make them find what was truly worthwhile in themselves. . . .
I would gladly write a public piece about you, but it seems to me quite irrelevant what “other people” think. . . . I’d also be delighted to write Claire personally with an “how could you” letter—just so she’d know there were limits some people at least still respected. . . .
I am so sorry someone wants to hurt you; you deserve so much better.
As the months passed, Roth wrestled with the question of Bloom’s motive for such a terrible attack; given a human tendency to underestimate his own failings, he focused mostly on her “continuing desire to win Anna’s favor.” That her efforts in that direction were unavailing was made uncomfortably public on Mothering Sunday, March 9, 1997, when the BBC presented Stars and Mas—an anodyne tribute whose TV listing betrayed at least one anomalous bit: “Spice Girl Emma Bunton and boxer Lennox Lewis talk about their close relationships with their mothers. Bob Marley’s mother Cedella Booker speaks of her devotion to her son, while actress Claire Bloom reveals a more complex relationship with her daughter.” The complexity is evident from the get-go, as Anna describes her mother (seated beside her) as “very childish for her age,” then tells about the time she had to force Bloom into telling the truth about her imminent divorce from Anna’s father: “I thought then that she was a weaker character than me already, at about five.” Soon they get onto the subject of Roth’s shocking demand that Anna move out:
BLOOM: I don’t believe in holding on to the past. Because it’s too painful. I believe in trying to let it go. [Anna scowls at her fingertips.] You believe in holding on to it.
STEIGER: No, I don’t. I just don’t believe in ignoring it, that’s all. Because I don’t believe it really has been aired as an issue, or confronted or faced. Or really discussed properly.
BLOOM: . . . Anna did come back; we lived together in the house for another I don’t know how many years. So it wasn’t a final break of any kind. I didn’t say ‘Go away and never come back.’ And she was eighteen; she was not a baby. She would have gone on with her life. I couldn’t face losing my relationship with Philip, that was so precious to me. [Bloom keeps nervously glancing at Anna to see how she’s taking things.]
STEIGER: I just feel there’s a lot of whitewash going on here. And bullshit frankly.
BLOOM: I’m the one who brought it up in the public field, so how can it be whitewash?
STEIGER: I don’t know. All I know is what I hear I don’t like. Somehow it makes me angry and I don’t see it in the same way or have the same perspective on it at all.
Finally Bloom is alone on camera, weeping over the loss of “her treacherous Machiavelli” (as Roth put it): “I remember the good times with gratitude and love,” she admits. For I Married a Communist, Roth worked directly from this videotape while writing the scene in which the washed-up Eve Frame appears with her daughter, Sylphid, on a TV show called The Apple and the Tree: “Sylphid doesn’t display a split second’s worth of affection for this pathetic woman struggling to hang on,” Murray Ringold observes. “Not a speck of generosity, let alone understanding.”
About six years later, quite by chance, Roth and Bloom crossed paths for the last time. One night he was strolling along Columbus Avenue with a girlfriend, Susan Rogers;# they’d paused to look in the window of a ladies shoe shop, and when they turned around to head south toward Roth’s apartment, there was Bloom and a friend, the flutist Eugenia Zukerman, about fifty yards away. “I decided to give Claire the kind of look you give somebody to whom you loaned your car, thirty years earlier, when you were in college, and who had banged it up and who now you were seeing for the first time since then,” Roth remembered. He did his best to muster that look, but he and Rogers burst into laughter as soon as Bloom passed. Later a mutual friend told Roth that Bloom had described him as “shaking with rage.” She “reported that I was ‘trembling so’ that she believed ‘they would have to call an ambulance and have [me] hospitalized.’ ”