CHAPTER
Forty-One
BY THE MIDNINETIES, ROTH’S FRIEND AND FAVORITE editor, Veronica Geng, had fallen on hard times. For years she’d worked at The New Yorker on a per-diem basis, but when Tina Brown took over as editor, in 1992, Geng decided she wanted the security of a salaried position; Brown (who considered Geng “too high-maintenance and flighty,” according to Hendrik Hertzberg) would agree only to raise her per-diem, and Geng quit in a huff. Since then she’d published her occasional casuals in The New York Review of Books instead of The New Yorker, and made ends meet by editing writers such as Roth on a freelance basis. She was living alone in a tiny apartment on the Upper East Side, in 1996, when she blacked out and collapsed; afterward, at New York Hospital, she was found to have a malignant, grapefruit-sized brain tumor on her right temporal lobe. She was fifty-five and had no health insurance.
Roth put up five thousand dollars for her medical expenses, and promptly arranged for her friends Barbara Epstein, Saul Steinberg, Roy Blount Jr., and James Hamilton to do likewise. Following her brain surgery, Geng stayed with a friend in Great Barrington, and, during Roth’s visits, wore a “dress” improvised from her hospital gown—one detail of many (her lurid surgical scar was another) that Roth would give to the similarly afflicted Amy Bellette in Exit Ghost. When Geng’s relations with her friend in the Berkshires became strained, Roth let her stay in his writing studio on West Seventy-ninth Street; with the help of nurses (hired by Roth) she lived there awhile, contentedly enough, until she had a seizure one night and was taken by ambulance to Sloan-Kettering. By then she was too weak to walk, and Roth would wheel her outside the hospital so she could smoke. On December 22, 1997, he noted in his diary that Geng had had trouble breathing during his visit, and two days later she died. On the cold, drizzly day she was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn (“Veronica Geng / Beautiful Soulful / Hilarious / Jan. 10, 1941–Dec. 24, 1997”), Roth brought things to an abrupt end when he turned on his heel and walked away; he and other mourners repaired to Patrissy’s Restaurant in Little Italy, and Roth picked up the tab ($540.05).
During this era he also performed good works in behalf of Emmanuel Dongala, a Congolese chemist and novelist Roth had befriended through the Huvelles, who’d served as Dongala’s foster parents when he’d come to the States, almost thirty years before, to attend Oberlin College. In 1994, when Roth was awarded the Karel Čapek Prize, he’d asked Dongala, a PEN delegate, to read his English acceptance speech (Klíma read the Czech version) in Prague. Three years later Dongala was dean of Marien Ngouabi University, in Brazzaville, when civil war broke out; as he wrote the Huvelles on August 10, 1997, the city center and university had been looted and almost entirely destroyed: “You see 15-year-old kids with Kalashnikovs roaming around and stopping you in the many roadblocks and these kids have the right of life or death on you. . . . It is very surrealistic, me reading American Pastoral while mortars are pounding away, the family frightened and hiding in the house. My best to Philip when you talk to him next.”
The Huvelles gave Roth the details and asked for his help getting Dongala and his family out of the country. Since a prerequisite for a visa was some promise of employment, Roth phoned his friend Leon Botstein, who promptly arranged an appointment for Dongala as a chemistry professor at Bard’s affiliate in Great Barrington, Simon’s Rock. Roth and the Huvelles were waiting at JFK when Dongala (“with a touch of malaria”) arrived in March 1998; meanwhile his twenty-year-old brother-in-law had been randomly murdered by a militia squad, and his wife, Pauline, was still hiding in the bush with their three teenage daughters. With the help of an aide in Senator Kennedy’s office, Roth managed to get visas a week later for Pauline and two of the daughters, but the United States consulate refused a visa for the oldest daughter, Assita—this by way of assurance, it seemed, that the other Dongalas wouldn’t seek permanent asylum. On April 4, 1998, Roth summarized the family’s predicament in a letter to President Clinton: “After experiencing some nine months of warfare, terror, and near-starvation,” he wrote of Assita, “a traumatized eighteen-year-old girl has been separated from her immediate family for reasons that are unfathomable to me.”
He still hadn’t received a reply on April 20, when Styron took him to lunch at the West Street Grill in Litchfield to celebrate his Pulitzer. Toward the end of their meal, Styron mentioned he was leaving for Washington, D.C., in a few hours for a White House dinner in honor of National Poetry Month. “Wait right here,” Roth said, and drove twenty minutes back to his house in Warren, retrieved a copy of his letter to the president, and drove back to the restaurant. “Put this in Bill Clinton’s hands,” he told Styron, “and tell him to read it.” Three days later Roth received a fax from Susan Beveridge at the White House (“This office handles the President’s casework and would be happy to assist”), and a month later Assita Dongala was reunited with her family in Great Barrington. As a housewarming gift, Roth gave the Dongalas one of his extra TV sets, and (as he had with Norman Manea) took the girls to a huge supermarket where they could marvel at “the ample displays of food in row after row. Tubs of frozen turkeys, mountains of oranges, etc.”—the bounty of America. Roth paid their tuition at an intensive English institute, and, within a year, the two younger daughters were on the honor roll at the local high school.
A few years earlier, Roth had tried using his leverage with the MacArthur Foundation to get a lucrative “genius” grant for Alfred Kazin, who’d retired in 1985 after a nearly fifty-year career at CUNY and was now trying to subsist on his credentials as one of the country’s preeminent literary critics. Just as Bellow’s fifth wife, Janis, had boosted Roth as a worthy friend to her husband, so Kazin’s fourth wife, Judith Dunford, had made it possible for Roth and Kazin to coexist more or less peaceably. In 1983, the Kazins bought a house in nearby Roxbury, and two or three times a year the couple would dine with Roth and Bloom, or else the two men would meet à deux at the Hopkins Inn. As Roth remembered, “Alfred began an evening by asking how you were and three minutes later, having barely been able to endure your reply, he began his lecture on the French Revolution or the poetry of Hart Crane or Lincoln’s prose style.” For the MacArthur Foundation, Roth described Kazin as “one of the treasures of American culture” and was furious when Kazin was passed over. “He is an old man, ill, without financial resources,” Roth wrote the foundation. “I was stupified [sic] by the people you chose over him last year. Please do not turn to me again for assistance.”
In early 1998, Kazin learned that his prostate cancer had spread to his bones, and Roth recommended the same hospice nurses he’d hired to take care of Geng in his apartment. The nurses were excellent but expensive: thirty-five dollars an hour, day and night. As Dunford observed, “It was one of those terrible American situations where you think maybe I should hope that he dies a little faster.” Happily or not, it didn’t last long—Kazin died on his eighty-third birthday, June 5—and meanwhile Dunford received a thousand dollars from Roth (“Please accept this as tuition for all I’ve learned from Alfred”), who also tried, again, to muster support from Barbara Epstein and other friends. After her husband’s death, Dunford asked Roth to help her find an editor for an anthology of Kazin’s work, and took his advice (“wisely,” said Roth, “because he did a brilliant job”) to approach Solotaroff; Roth also persuaded Wylie to handle Kazin’s literary estate, even though, as Dunford put it, “if they made back their postage cost, I’d be surprised.” Indeed, the posthumous anthology, Alfred Kazin’s America (a title Roth suggested), was largely ignored—a sad commentary on the thankless labors of American belletrists; Roth pressed all but one or two of his twelve copies on friends and visitors.
In 2011, Kazin’s journals were published by Yale University Press, and Roth learned how deeply one of his idols had loathed him. “Philip Roth, the male shrew” was a favorite epithet, referring (a little ironically, Roth thought) to the younger man’s tendency to monopolize conversations in a noisy, pompous way, so that Kazin was “always glad to see him depart in all his prosperity and self-satisfaction.” Roth brooded about things for a couple of years, and finally wrote the widow: “I fail to understand Alfred’s profound distaste for me in his journals. I don’t really care”—though plainly he did—“but I do find it peculiar. What did I ever do to him? That generation of Jewish intellectuals and their touchy fucking grievances.”
“HEMINGWAY SAID, ‘Life is a cheap thing beside a man’s work,’ ” Roth had written Riki Wagman in 1972. “It may be the smartest thing Hemingway ever said.” By the late nineties, Roth’s life had shrunk (or expanded, as he would have it) almost entirely around his writing. Less and less did he see the point of visiting New York, except for a couple of days a month “to get a haircut and eat some good Chinese food”—but work was all that really mattered, and he always worked better in the country. “When you’re in New York, in the apartment, and you’re stuck, what can you do? Put your shoes on, go downstairs, walk to Zabar’s and back? Walk in Central Park? This is better than Central Park; I own my own Central Park.”
The apartment on West Seventy-seventh had always been cursed, as far as Roth was concerned, and he couldn’t wait to get rid of it. The tenants above him (writer Nancy Friday and her husband, Time editor Norman Pearlstine) had a greenhouse on their terrace, and a decade of daily watering had rendered Roth’s apartment all but uninhabitable. First the pictures on his walls—the Roth caricatures by David Levine, the Guston cartoon of a Roth-like writer stabbing a Howe-like critic, etc.—became stained and cockled from leaks, and he had to pay Cella Manea to restore them; toward the end, all the furniture and rugs had to be removed, and the apartment was vacant except for buckets to catch water. On March 9, 1998, Roth finally managed to sell the place—for $600,000, exactly what he’d paid for it a decade before—whereupon he notified Wylie via fax: “AS FAR AS ANYONE IS CONCERNED, I NO LONGER HAVE ANY CONNECTION TO NYC”—that is to say, his pied-à-terre on Seventy-ninth was not for public consumption.
Wherever he happened to be, Roth didn’t want to be bothered. He demanded the removal of his entry from International Who’s Who when they repeated the mistake of publishing his home address (albeit with a crucial typo that rendered it pretty much untraceable), and he posted two little signs near his desk: “Stay Put” and “No Optional Striving.” Occasionally he’d complain of loneliness, but, almost in the same breath, remind himself (and perhaps his cleaning person or caretaker, if they happened to be around) that he’d only get in trouble with women if he ventured out. Sometimes, to be sure, on bleak winter days when he was snowed in, Roth would pull on his boots in the morning and feel about “three minutes” of melancholy; then he’d remember Bloom and think, “But there’s no friction.” And he’d smile. “My schedule is absolutely my own,” he explained to David Remnick of The New Yorker. “Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don’t have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don’t have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back and I work for two or three more hours.” Around this time Roth heard that a developer wanted to buy ninety-three acres across the road and build a subdivision; foreseeing the ruin of his rural utopia (“a school bus, the whole works”), Roth immediately phoned his local lawyer and told him to find out a price for the land—two million, it turned out—and pay it. “Don’t hondel [bargain],” said Roth. “Just give him the money.”
“Beware the utopia of isolation,” Murray Ringold warns Zuckerman toward the end of I Married a Communist. “Beware the utopia of the shack in the woods, the oasis defense against rage and grief. An impregnable solitude.” For a while, Roth sought to assuage his own solitude by getting back in touch with the friends of his youth. Back in 1985, Marty Weich had arranged a reunion at his Manhattan apartment for Roth and the rest of the boys: Bob Heyman, Stu Lehman, and Bernie Swerdlow. Later, when Roth had returned to the States for good, he and Weich made a point of meeting twice a year at Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side (“redolent of the smoked fish delis of our childhood”), and Roth was gratified to find his former best friend little changed. Every morning, after dropping his son at school, Weich would drive all the way out to New Jersey to visit his senile mother (“Stand up straight!” she’d greet him), then race back to Manhattan so he could start meeting patients around eleven. In his spare time he was writing a musical.
The others had led conventionally successful lives, for the most part. Heyman was an endodontist whose thriving Fifth Avenue practice attracted patients such as Lauren Bacall and Willie Mays, while Stu Lehman (still married to his college sweetheart) was an oral and maxillofacial surgeon. Howie Silver, another dentist, hadn’t been part of the tight circle who used to gather for parties in Heyman’s basement, but he’d also graduated with the class of 1950 and was an enthusiastic, good-natured addition to these later meetings. A more exotic creature (still) was Bernie Swerdlow, whose boyhood colitis and satyriasis Roth had given to Melvin Weiner and Smolka, respectively, in Portnoy. At Weich’s apartment in 1985, Swerdlow had mentioned a memoir he was writing and asked Roth if he wanted to be his coauthor. “Everybody wants to write a book about themselves,” said Roth.
Actually he might have made something interesting of Swerdlow’s later adventures. A psychiatrist like Weich, Swerdlow had wangled his way into the University of Amsterdam medical school, whither he’d dragged his first wife (one of the few shiksas at Weequahic) until the marriage broke up amid their grinding poverty abroad (“the boys took up a collection,” Heyman recalled, “and gave money to Bernie to see him through”). Swerdlow returned to the States, single, and set up a lively practice on the Jersey Shore—but invariably sex and drugs got him into trouble, until he’d flee the wreckage and hang his shingle in some other part of the country: California at one point, and finally Winter Park, Florida, where he (the author of Whiplash and Related Headaches) started his own headache clinic. At a high school reunion, as Lowenstein reported to Roth, Swerdlow had shown up, late, “with a girl twice his height and half the age of his daughter. . . . He claims he is flat broke, cleaned out by wife #5—I may be off there, but not by much.”
Whatever his raffishness, Swerdlow was a sentimental soul who treasured his old friendships—he kept a memorabilia-filled “Weequahic Room” at his home in Winter Park—serving as the “spark plug” for what became periodic gatherings with Roth et al. He also tended to guide the discussions in predictable ways, until Howie Silver hosted a reunion at his house in Deal, New Jersey, and insisted they take things to a higher plane—that is, by drawing little slips of paper with heavy prompts (“What level of happiness are you experiencing?”) out of a brandy snifter. “Screw that,” said Heyman. “Let’s talk about jerking off. Or almost getting laid in the old days.” That would have suited Roth, who also hosted a meeting in Connecticut on October 27, 1996, less than two weeks after the publication of Leaving a Doll’s House. “Don’t mention Claire’s name!” Sandy hissed into their guests’ ears, intercepting each man on arrival.
It was Swerdlow who insisted—with Roth’s tacit blessing—that wives be barred from the proceedings. “I have a lifestyle and a philosophy that, literally, have diverged from my friends,” Swerdlow wrote Lowenstein in 1988, complaining that one of “the boys” was “married to a hypochondriac, hysterical, paranoid woman,” and who the hell needed such people cramping his style? Then, too, by the late nineties, wives might have reminded Swerdlow that he himself was fated to die alone. “To sleep at night,” he wrote Roth in 1998, “I hug my pillow and fantasize a loving woman. Of all the things I accomplished and did not accomplish in my life I regret not having had a long lasting relationship.” Diabetes killed him a few months later, whereupon the reunions came to end—not least, for Roth, because the others wanted to bring wives now that Bernie wasn’t around to object.
FOR A FEW YEARS Roth’s isolation was mitigated by Julia Golier’s company on weekends. Friday evenings she’d take a train to Wingdale, New York—stopping opposite a deserted asylum, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center—where she was met by an elderly Warren neighbor, Mr. Beecher, who’d drive her the half hour to Roth’s house. A dinner of broiled fish, corn, and tomatoes was usually waiting. During her visits Golier would plug away at grant applications on her laptop while Roth worked in his studio, followed by an afternoon swim, another fish dinner, and maybe a few games of cards.
Roth looked forward to celebrating Thanksgiving dans le vrai—that is, with Golier’s big Catholic family in Montvale, New Jersey. Golier’s mother, Mary Lou, had tried reading Portnoy when it was first published, but had to quit about halfway in. “If I ever thought I would have a daughter who would be in touch with him, I don’t know what I would have done,” she said. But right away she was disarmed. Roth arrived with flowers, effusively praised the food, and made a point of accepting pumpkin pie despite his rigid diet. “It was a little bit of Bucknell again,” he said, remembering the time Golier’s father had asked him to say grace: “ ‘I’m not a religious man,’ ” Roth quoted the Swede, “ ‘but when I look around this table, I know that something is shining down on me.’ ”
By the time she was thirty-five or so, Golier wanted to marry and start a family—with Roth, preferably, who “thought very seriously” about it but finally declined, given his advanced age and “crushingly unsuccessful” marital history. The end was terrible for both of them (“I cried for a week,” said Golier), but a loving friendship endured. In the years before Golier’s marriage, in 2002, Roth often called to commiserate about her grueling ordeal of dating strange men, and meanwhile they continued to meet for dinners, movies, and concerts, even taking trips together; eventually Roth named her the co-executor of his estate.*
Once Golier was gone, as Roth put it, “exercise took the place of companionship.” He went on long walks, even in freezing weather, and looked forward to his thrice-weekly meetings with a personal trainer, who helped him regain the strength he’d lost during his long siege of back pain in the early nineties. He also hired a caretaker and long-distance driver, Peter Carberry. Once, while cleaning out the attic, Roth directed Carberry to take one of his old IBM Selectrics to the dump, but Carberry suggested Roth autograph it and let Carberry try selling it on eBay, splitting the proceeds. Roth signed it above the keys with a Sharpie and gave it to Carberry on the condition he put the money aside for his daughter’s education.†
Roth’s retainers also included Kathy Meetz, his cleaner since 1990, who usually arrived around nine, when he was finishing his stretching routine before heading out to his studio. A bit of cordial banter was de rigueur. Once, Meetz mentioned that Francine Gray had interviewed her for a job. If hired, Meetz wondered, would she have to wear a uniform like Gray’s cook? Roth urged her to do some spying for him chez Gray, then affected to have second thoughts (“She’s too provincial for you”). In some such context he also remarked how nice it would be “to sit on a riverbank and watch all the dead bodies of [my] enemies floating by.”
Roth was a kindly but demanding employer, who often left monitory notes for Meetz: “THERE IS LOTS OF DUST EVERYWHERE,” he wrote on returning from a weekend in New York. “Dust all surfaces, including base of lamps, rungs of chairs, etc. . . . There is a very fine dust there [floor] that has to be mopped up. But don’t use anything on the floors with a strong smell.” Meetz cherished one note, from 1997, that tallied the usual delinquencies before ending “OTHERWISE THE HOUSE IS SPLENDID!” She was keenly aware that Roth’s life, post-Golier, had become almost morbidly lonely, and once encouraged him to inquire about a sign he’d seen—“Kittens for Sale”—over the receptionist’s desk at an ophthalmologist’s office in Torrington. As Roth recalled, he picked out two “enchanting orange things” from a litter of six, and over the weekend did little more than watch them play. On Monday he asked Meetz to return them. As Zuckerman remarks to his friend Larry Hollis, who presses two orange kittens on the solitary writer in Exit Ghost, “They’re too delightful.”
OTHER THAN HIS TRAINER, Roth’s only occasional companion in Litchfield County was C. H. Huvelle—“the loving, accepting, complicitous grown-up,” as Thurman described him, a “father figure” seventeen years older than Roth. Back when Huvelle was his regular physician, Roth used to envy the doting daily esteem he elicited from patients in his waiting room. “Nobody smiles at me when I walk into my studio in the morning,” Roth told him. “Nobody eagerly looks up and reverentially says to me, ‘Good morning, Writer, good morning, Dr. Roth.’ ” Huvelle retired in 1983—a year after he first detected Roth’s coronary artery disease—because cataracts and retinal detachments had left him nearly blind. “I will be delighted to continue my professional services to you (and to Claire),”‡ he wrote Roth at the time, “as long as I know that Victor”—Hurst, Roth’s cardiologist then—“is in the firehouse ready to respond if I pull the alarm.”
During the summer of 1993, a month or so before he went to Silver Hill, Roth conceived the idea of writing a biographical essay about his friend—something of a pretext, he wrote, “to keep myself from drowning by putting myself at the service of this wonderfully reasonable and amiable man and just being in his company a few times a week.” On these mornings, Roth would walk the cheerful streets of Litchfield until it was time to sit with Huvelle in his backyard arbor and discuss the man’s days in the army, in medical school, and so forth; finally Roth would turn off his tape recorder and return to his own woes: “C. H., what should I do about Claire? I don’t know what to do. She’s not with me when I need her, and when she is with me, she’s no use. I’m going under. . . .” Dr. Huvelle: A Biographical Sketch was written in the weeks after Silver Hill, while Roth was still picking around the threads of Sabbath’s Theater; in October he took the manuscript to a Litchfield County print shop and ordered seventy-five copies of a thirty-four-page booklet, which began with a telling anecdote from Huvelle’s childhood, when he’d ignored his father’s admonition to stop sucking a penny and ended up swallowing it: “He had to defecate in a potty until the penny appeared. When it came out, the boy cleaned it and saved it. . . . The seeds of independence.” Roth placed copies with the Litchfield Historical Society, the local library, and his archive at the Library of Congress, giving the rest to the Huvelles and their friends.
“Philip called,” Conarroe wrote in his diary on June 22, 2000. “C. H. died. Said he couldn’t go into detail or he’d cry.” He saved the main detail for his novel The Dying Animal: like Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, the barely conscious Huvelle had friends and family come to his bedside, one by one, and say goodbye; when his wife, Bab, appeared, “he began rather frantically to undo the buttons on her blouse,” Roth remembered (“Wonder who he thought I was,” the wife of the more goatish O’Hearn remarks afterward). For Huvelle’s funeral at the Litchfield Congregational Church—where Lyman Beecher, the stern Calvinist father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, used to preach—Roth read a few passages from his biographical essay, ending with a quote from the subject: “ ‘If I die tonight, I’ve had a damn good life.’ ” Roth was told the minister winced; at any rate the man avoided Roth at the reception afterward.
AFTER THE BLOOM FIASCO, said Bernie Avishai, “Philip desperately needed men in his life who he thought were on his side and he could count on to take care of him in certain ways that he increasingly thought women couldn’t.” One such man was Jonathan Brent, who’d met Roth in 1983 when he interviewed him for the Chicago Tribune. Brent was then teaching at Northwestern and running its university press; he told Roth about a journal he was starting, Formations, specializing in Eastern European literature, and Roth took it upon himself to solicit donations of a few hundred dollars apiece from a diverse roster of writers, including Updike, Mario Puzo, Toni Morrison, and Leon Uris. “He’s a brilliant fellow and a good man,” Roth said of Brent many years later, “and I wish we hadn’t lost touch.”
They lost touch roughly ten years after Brent’s move, in 1991, to Yale University Press—hitherto a time of increasingly close friendship between the two, post-Bloom, when they’d meet for dinner every other month or so (sometimes with Ross Miller in tow) at a midway point between Warren and New Haven, Heritage Village in Southbury, a genteel retirement community that happened to have a good restaurant.§ Brent was going through a bad patch in his marriage: for years he’d been frustrated in his writing projects (a novel and a book about Stalin) because of onerous family obligations; indeed he’d felt thwarted for most of his adult life, since he’d married right out of college and now had two children to support besides. Characteristically Roth advised him to strike out on his own and focus on his writing; he even managed to cajole Brent into consulting a divorce lawyer, but when it came to a point the younger man couldn’t go through with it. He loved his wife and children too much, and besides he felt “afraid of Philip emotionally”—that is, Roth’s interest in him seemed a little “voyeuristic,” and also, on some level, he sensed Roth wanted him to get a divorce so he’d become more dependent on Roth (“Philip wants me to do this for him, not for myself,” he thought). On June 29, 2000, Roth registered his irritation about Brent’s change of heart with a little note to himself: “ ‘It would be a meaningful and beautiful experience for her.’ Where did he get this language? From her? Needs the compensating sentimentality for the aggression against the wife. Now the divorce is off.”
The friendship might have survived if Roth had confined his irritation to notes, but instead he worked things out by lampooning Brent in The Dying Animal as Kepesh’s timid, self-righteous son, Kenny, who stays in a bad marriage despite his father’s well-meaning advice: “As for conjugal sex, a heinous duty he stoically performs, that is beyond even his fortitude now. Arguments abound, irritable bowel syndrome abounds, placations abound, threats abound, as do counter-threats. But when I ask, ‘Then why not leave?’ he tells me that leaving would destroy his family.” Lest there be any uncertainty on the point, Roth freely admitted to Brent that he’d used him as Kenny in the book (with the usual caveat that fiction is fiction, etc.), whereupon “at some stupid moment” Brent confided things to his wife, whose reaction may be imagined.
Afterward, relations with Roth were “very tepid at best,” though Brent couldn’t help feeling a little relieved. “He needed more emotionally from me than I could deliver,” he said, some fourteen years later. “I don’t know how else to put this: He needs somebody who can truly love him—that’s why he’s lost. Because he lives in kind of an empty world. Not intellectually empty; not artistically empty; but in some deep psychic way. And it’s an emptiness that he has cultivated very carefully. Because he can control that world. But it leaves him empty and I think he’s in great need of real love that he can’t find.” Other friends have groped their way toward similar observations. “I think there’s something in his makeup he’s missing,” said Julius Goldstein in 1996. “I don’t know who his close friends are, really.” And when Roth marveled—deploringly—over the long duration of Alain Finkielkraut’s marriage, it occurred to Finkielkraut that he and Roth didn’t really understand each other and perhaps never would: “He doesn’t know much about my life—my private life, my books . . . I guess I am useful, but why?” Finkielkraut paused, then said to his interviewer: “You should ask him.”
IN 1998, Roth’s blood pressure shot up and couldn’t be controlled with the usual medication; after a month of testing, an occlusion was found in his renal artery and the first of Roth’s many stents was inserted. Soon he got another stent in his left carotid artery, and in 2000 his cardiac surgeon, Jeffrey Moses, inserted a stent in Roth’s LAD artery—during which he discovered that, at some point, an obstructed graft had caused a silent heart attack on the posterior wall, permanently damaging the muscle. As Roth pointed out, Ross Miller—by then Roth’s health care proxy and vice versa—“never failed” him throughout these ordeals and the many to come.
“I’ve had a bumper year,” Roth wrote his friend on October 24, 2000, enclosing a check for ten thousand dollars. “I want you to share in the general prosperity.” By then the two had become all but inseparable. Jack Miles remembered sitting in Roth’s studio while Roth and Miller chatted on the phone—about nothing, really; the Mets maybe—and noting Roth’s perfect laughing ease: “They’d spoken earlier in the day and they would speak again later in the day,” said Miles. “It was like a marriage, I thought.” After years of friction with Bloom and others, it was bliss talking with a like-minded chum about “boys stuff”—baseball and books, yes, but especially women—minus the kind of inhibition that marred his camaraderie with long-married friends like Finkielkraut and Michael Herr. As Zuckerman reflects in The Human Stain, “the male friendship is incomplete” if one can’t speak openly about sex: “Most men never find such a friend. . . . But when it does happen, when two men find themselves in agreement about this essential part of being a man, unafraid of being judged, shamed, envied, or outdone, confident of not having the confidence betrayed, their human connection can be very strong and an unexpected intimacy results.” Such a friend, for a while, was Ross Miller.
Another of Miller’s assets (as Roth saw it) was that he was undaunted by Roth’s fame because he himself, after all, was the nephew of Arthur Miller—that is, he was “inured” to fame, as opposed to being (as others saw it) galled by it, and pathologically envious of those who possessed it. At the height of their friendship, anyway, Miller seemed mostly requited by his status as boon companion to one of the world’s greatest writers. “Don’t think I’m second banana,” he startled Hermione Lee, when she came to visit Roth in the hospital. Indeed, Miller considered himself to be Roth’s intellectual equal (he said as much)—resembling, in this respect, the manqué Gersbach in Herzog: “Did Valentine Gersbach ever admit ignorance of any matter? He was a regular Goethe. He finished all your sentences, rephrased all your thoughts, explained everything.” Conarroe, for one, never forgot the time he bumped into Miller during the intermission of a Dame Edna show, whereupon Miller proceeded to give a lecture on the nuances of camp to him, a gay professor. As for Miller’s own attempts at humor, they were mostly aimed to please an audience of one—Roth—who was easily tickled by a bawdy bon mot, man to man, though not so much when Miller, say, conspicuously feigned sleep at Roth’s table, during a public ceremony, while a boring dinner speaker went on too long praising Roth. “It’s my third bad marriage,” said Roth, in 2012, of the friendship. “I should have been put in jail when I was twenty, and locked up until I was seventy. That way I couldn’t have done any harm. I don’t mean harm to the community, I mean harm to myself.”
MILLER WAS ALWAYS at his best, Roth thought, during their annual summer “pilgrimage” to the Bellows in Vermont. The two friends plus the Maneas would take rooms at the White House Inn in nearby Wilmington, and, for three or four days, devote themselves to amusing Bellow, who, again, had managed in the fullness of time to become well-disposed toward Roth, and who’d always had a soft spot for “lesser lights” like Miller—a point made by at least two of his biographers, James Atlas and Zachary Leader: “According to [Anthony] Hecht,” noted the latter, “ ‘Saul was always a sucker for flattery, and Jack’ ”—Ludwig, model for the treacherous Gersbach—“ ‘would lay it on with a trowel.’ ”
Some of Janis Bellow’s “happiest memories” were of these visits in the late nineties, when her husband was in his eighties but still lively enough to enjoy all-day excursions such as a boat trip along the Connecticut River. He and Roth would sit at a table together, their heads almost touching, and occasionally Bellow would throw his head back and laugh, which suggested they were off the subject of books and into more personal territory. (“Saul, how could you marry five women?” “I don’t ask myself those questions any longer.”)
It was Roth who, twelve years earlier, had suggested to James Atlas that he write a biography of Bellow. He and Atlas had become friends in 1977, when Roth read the twenty-eight-year-old Atlas’s first biography and wrote one of his nicely considered fan letters:
I’ve just finished reading your book on Delmore Schwartz and am still under its spell. It’s an agonizing story, but you present it with such tact and clarity that finally—though I know it doesn’t lessen his agony any—it at least comforts the reader knowing that someone has contemplated that life in its entirety and given its due. It is a beautiful act of sympathy and understanding.
Atlas was overwhelmed—Roth was one of his idols—and for the next few days he wrote a long, rather tortured letter of gratitude (“thousands of words”), until his wife, Anna Fels, advised him simply to say, in effect, “Thank you. Your letter meant a lot to me.” Sensing he’d found another ideal reader, Roth invited the young man to Warren and gave him a draft of The Ghost Writer. Their subsequent discussion, he wrote Atlas, proved to be “of enormous value”: “you are someone after my own heart, you know, because you do your homework, and it was clear you had done it for me with my manuscript.”
A decade later Atlas was at sea. After five years of fitful labor, he’d decided to abort his biography of Edmund Wilson because of a “toxic response to his character” (“I warned you about that,” said Roth), and also he’d left his job at The New York Times. Over lunch at the Russian Tea Room (so Atlas recorded in his journal), Roth “launched into a stunningly eloquent analysis of the decisions I’d made,” meanwhile assuring Atlas that he’d soon find another project to his liking—namely Bellow, “a natural choice” for Atlas. “I had grown up in Chicago; my parents were from the same Northwest Side Jewish milieu that Bellow had rendered so vividly in a succession of books”; also, Bellow had been a great friend of Delmore Schwartz (model for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Humboldt’s Gift) and naturally partook of the same cultural ethos. In 1992, Roth helped things along by recommending Atlas for a Guggenheim, and, on getting word from Conarroe (then the foundation’s president), Roth phoned Atlas one Sunday morning with the good news (“so I don’t learn like other normal people do; I learn from Philip Roth”). At times, though, Roth could be a cagey benefactor. The two were neighbors on West Seventy-seventh and would occasionally bump into each other—encounters that tended to make Atlas a little fretful. Once Roth invited him up to his apartment and left him alone in a room where Atlas spied, on a chair, a letter from Bellow; “You’ve probably already Xeroxed it,” Roth said on returning, but didn’t show it to him or discuss its contents. “As for Atlas’s biography of Bellow,” Roth wrote Ted Hoagland around this time, “I reserve judgment.”
Roth decided his wariness was well founded when Atlas published a selection of journal entries about Bellow in the June 26, 1995, issue of The New Yorker. Titled “The Shadow in the Garden”—a phrase Bellow had used to describe Atlas, after the shadow cast by a gravestone—the entries revealed Atlas’s growing disaffection with his subject, not to say envy (“why him and not me?”) over the relative glamor of Bellow’s life and achievement. “My greatest fear is that we’ll have a falling out someday,” Atlas wrote. “The person with whom I used to experience a huge paternal transference doesn’t exist as powerfully for me anymore; I feel independent of him, but also sad. There is no Dad. Certainly not this difficult, prickly character.”
After Atlas’s New Yorker piece, Roth assumed a chill civility in his rare communications with his former friend. On June 21, 1997, he wrote Atlas a request to see, as agreed, any direct quotations from their earlier interview that Atlas planned to use in the finished book; Atlas replied that he was still in the process of cutting, and wouldn’t know what he was definitely using until the fall. When Roth hadn’t heard further by the following March, he wrote a brief reminder to Atlas, who replied as follows: “Relax. My book isn’t done yet; it’s been delayed. . . . Do you think I’m going to ‘cheat’ and smuggle in quotes from you without your approval? That’s not how I do things. When I’m ready to seek your permission, I’ll seek it. I want to do this book right.” That tore it. Roth wrote Wylie (their mutual agent) that he found the note “egregiously rude,” and now wanted to deny Atlas “use of any and all material” from their interview. In the end Roth relented on his threat,¶ but was unmoved by Atlas’s apology a few months later (“I’m sorry I snapped at you”) and duly skeptical when Atlas ventured a diffident hope that Roth would find the published book “generous, fair, and interesting.”
Roth found the book a “belittling distortion” of his literary and personal hero, blinded to its merits by what he described as “the banality of all that righteous, boring pseudo-p[s]ychiatric moralizing.” Atlas himself would come to regret the scolding tone he sometimes took toward his subject, who once quipped that he’d married his second wife, Sondra, to “get into her pants”: “It was a remarkably adolescent way of looking at the challenge of seduction for a man of almost forty,” Atlas wrote; “if he was joking—a generous interpretation—the crudeness of his language was significant. Sondra was (to put it less bluntly than Bellow did) a sexual object; as such, she didn’t require fidelity.” Perhaps, but hardly the sort of thing that was apt to sit well with Roth, who was at least as fond of ribaldry as his beloved Bellow; nor did Roth agree with Atlas’s judgment that the writer Vivian Gornick was “justifiably” offended by the way Bellow (and Roth) “depicted women in his novels.” For his part, Atlas would remain rightly proud of his book’s “scope and structure and literary insights,” but he was aware, too, that something had misfired. He admitted to growing “impatient,” over the years, with Bellow’s evasions, vacillations, and general crabbiness (“I want to get on with my story, live my life,” Atlas wrote in The New Yorker), and such irritation found its way into his book and at least one letter to Roth, whose vehement displeasure was conveyed to Atlas by a mutual friend.
And yet Atlas could scarcely have known the half of it. “You sounded in good spirits on the phone today,” Roth wrote Bellow on September 14, 2000, about a month before publication of Bellow: A Biography. “You’re taking this Atlas shit like a champ.” By then Roth had spent more than two years working on a plan to neutralize the damage of Atlas’s book (a book he’d taken no little part in encouraging): viz., a corrective interview with Bellow, covering his magisterial oeuvre from Augie March to the present day, that would be “four times longer” than any of the other interviews in Roth’s forthcoming collection, Shop Talk—“the last, best word on this great man,” as Roth would have it. After rereading each novel he proposed to send a list of questions for Bellow to answer at his leisure, and meanwhile Roth convened a reading group of three “smart Yeshiva bochers” to help enrich his insights: Miller, Manea, and Ed Rothstein, the Times cultural reporter whose stellar review of Zuckerman Unbound (“The Revenge of the Vrai”) Roth hadn’t forgotten.# Manea soon dropped out for linguistic reasons, but the others met once a month at Roth’s New York studio for “wonderful semi-fierce discussions” about a given Bellow novel, followed by a good Chinese meal. “Book talk, smart guys, chattering over dinner, going home,” said Roth. “No friction.”
But the fading Bellow was distracted by work on his final novel, Ravelstein, and it might have been clear to anyone but Roth that his Shop Talk interview was a lot more important to him than to Bellow, who took months to compose a single answer, when he bothered at all. “Yours, not Atlas’s, should be the last word on what you’ve done,” Roth hectored him on June 6, 1999, almost a year after proposing the project, and finally Roth decided to take matters even more firmly in hand. For a few days in early December, he informed Bellow, Roth would stay at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, and spend “four or five hours a day”—two sessions a day, morning and afternoon—interviewing Bellow at his home in Brookline; afterward they’d prepare a transcript and Bellow could formulate his final answers based on that. Time was of the essence, Roth insisted, since David Remnick was eager to publish their interview in The New Yorker to coincide with (and, Roth hoped, to undermine) Atlas’s biography.
Each morning Roth would join Bellow in his upstairs study at ten o’clock, and by noon Bellow “had had it”; the two men and Janis would adjourn to a nearby Thai restaurant, then Roth would work at his hotel in the afternoon and return chez Bellow for an early dinner and nightcap. As for the interviews themselves, Roth did most of the talking while Bellow listened and laughed and occasionally put up a kind of droll, token resistance to being led around by the nose, as though he were trying to fend off an overzealous encyclopedia salesman.
ROTH: Whenever you go to Chicago in your books it’s exuberant, whenever you come to New York you’re depressed.
BELLOW: I never realized that.
ROTH: . . . You can’t even imagine being lost in Chicago until The Dean’s December.
BELLOW: I can’t really see that I am so utterly place-dependent. . . .
ROTH [after an exhaustive explanation]: . . . You know?
BELLOW: With certain reservations, I do know.
“You’re gonna finally understand yourself when this is over,” Roth quipped at one point, while Bellow (perhaps in an effort to detach himself further from the ordeal) began referring to Roth in the third person: “Roth likes Henderson, and I am grateful to him for that. . . . Again Roth puts it better than I could have done.” “I want you to understand that I’m not James Atlas,” Roth reminded his weary elder, who replied, “I know that.”
“Saul failing badly,” Conarroe observed in his diary on July 12, 2000, but Roth persevered. With Atlas’s book imminent, he was all the more determined to finish the job, going over their sketchy interview transcript and marking in red, for Bellow’s benefit, whatever seemed most pertinent to a given set of questions. On July 15, he tried putting his foot down:
If you give me two hours a day, a morning hour and an afternoon hour, you should be able to do a question a week, which means that by the end of August the job will be done. If it is, we can then get it to Remnick for publication in The New Yorker in October. It would be the perfect response from you, and the only one necessary. This is your job: DO IT.
Otherwise, please:
1. Don’t look at the Atlas book. . . .
2. Change your phone number NOW, and give the new number only to intimates. . . .
4. Say nothing about the book to anyone outside the very inner circle. NOT A WORD. NOTHING. DON’T SHOW THE WOUND TO A SOUL. THIS IS THE DISCIPLINE REQUIRED.
But it was no use, and finally Roth poured the collective insights of the last couple of years into a long essay, “Re-Reading Saul Bellow,” which appeared in the October 9, 2000, issue of The New Yorker. “Remnick must know that he struck it rich, this time,” a grateful Bellow wrote Roth, “—no Eng. Lit. Prof. would be capable of doing what you’ve done with my books.”** Fair enough: with adulatory élan Roth explicated the better qualities of Bellow’s mature novels, singling out Herzog as his “grandest creation” because it best exemplified “the nearly impossible undertaking that marks Bellow’s work as strongly as it does the novels of Robert Musil and Thomas Mann: the struggle not only to infuse fiction with mind but to make mentalness itself central to the hero’s dilemma—to think . . . about the problem of thinking.” Finally, when Bellow died in April 2005, Roth saw to it that The New Yorker published Bellow’s entire written response to Roth’s interview question about the origin of Augie March—“without any editorial correction or alteration,” oddly enough, since Bellow’s incipient dementia was awkwardly highlighted by the way he circled back three times to the same basic (if charming) story, to wit: while spending a Guggenheim year in Paris, Bellow had been mired in writing a lugubrious philosophical novel set in a hospital, until one day he happened to think of a childhood friend who used to shout “I got a scheme!”—after which Bellow jettisoned the hospital novel and wrote an exuberant “speculative biography” of his lost chum, The Adventures of Augie March. And so a great writer was fledged.
“THIS IS HOW I whiled away the last fifteen months,” Roth wrote the Bellows on December 10, 1997, enclosing the penultimate draft of I Married a Communist. Bellow read the long book in three weeks, and was as stylish in aspersion as Roth (vis-à-vis Bellow) was in praise. Lamenting the “absence of distance” between Roth and his characters—a sin Bellow confessed to having committed in Herzog (where, however, he “hoped the comic effects might protect [him]”)—he wondered how Roth could bear such a “cast-iron klutz” as Ira Ringold, and what about the other principals in his cast? “Eve is simply a pitiful woman and Sylphid is a pampered, wicked fat girl with a bison hump.” Bellow ended his critique with the hope that Roth wouldn’t “cast [him] off forever,” and Roth replied with a vigorous defense of his novel followed by the usual gracious valediction: “You’ve been in my bloodstream since I read Augie March. It’s going to take more than mere candor for me to cast you out for half an hour, let alone ‘forever.’ ”
Truth be known, Roth was rather proud of the distance he’d achieved between his fictional world of midcentury Communist hysteria and his own latter-day personal woes, though he realized others might disagree on a legal (versus aesthetic) basis. For Milbank Tweed’s consideration, he composed “a detailed anatomy of the relationship between major characters in the book and the real-life counterparts who, to a greater or lesser degree, serve as inspiration.” Eve Frame, of course, was “modeled on the personality of Claire Bloom,” though Roth had “substantially altered” the facts. It was true that Frame’s second husband, Miles “Jumbo” Freedman, was a lot like Bloom’s second husband, Hillard “Hilly” Elkins. Both, said Roth, were theatrical producers who might be described as “short and unattractive” and had perpetuated their wives’ careers while stealing their money; in this case lawyers persuaded Roth to change Freedman into Frame’s third husband, now a real estate speculator (but still a “sex clown”). Carlton Pennington therefore became Frame’s second husband, based on the man who’d written a suavely bitchy blurb for Doll’s House: “she even makes—inadvertently—her last husband, Philip Roth, into something he himself has failed to do—not for want of trying—interesting at last.” Thus Roth was spurred, he confessed, to the task of making Gore Vidal “interesting” as the secretly gay, anti-Semitic Pennington, a silent-movie actor who manages to sire Sylphid and becomes more and more grotesque after his career tanks: “Drunk every night, on the prowl, a bitter ex-somebody ranting and raving about the Jews who run Hollywood who ruined his career.” Roth figured this character was sufficiently camouflaged as written.††
Sylphid was “modeled closely” on Anna Steiger, Roth informed his lawyers, though privately he considered the fictional version “much more appealing” than the real thing. For instance, at one of her mother’s soirées, the wittily cynical Sylphid goes out of her way to put the young Zuckerman at ease by “helping [him] gradually to understand that there wasn’t as much at stake as all the pomp suggested”: “What’s most laughable about that lunatic is her grandiosity,” she remarks of one guest, the writer Katrina Van Tassel Grant, confiding to Nathan that her mother had secretly nicknamed the woman Loony. For Milbank Tweed, Roth explained the resemblance between Grant and Francine Gray as follows: “Both women are depicted as tall, thin, and blond-haired. Each has two private school-educated sons, each is a bad writer, and each is a calculating, incessant liar. There are no significant similarities beyond these.”
Roth expected his novel to stir up a lot of gossip, the ubiquity of which was, after all, one of its major themes: “Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism is the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience.” Nowhere was the tendency more pronounced, Roth thought, than in so-called cultural journalism—“maniacally dedicated, as all gossip is, to knowing who is doing dirty to whom.” As if to gratify his worst expectations, the Times ran a piece titled “Writers as Plunderers,” by none other than Dinitia Smith, who decried the recent spate of “tell-all books” by such as Mia Farrow, Lillian Ross, and Roth, the last of whom “has made a career of taking elements from his life for his fiction,” and whose new novel was regarded by some as “simply payback” (Smith also noted that The Ghost Writer had been “about” Malamud). As for the Times review of I Married a Communist—by Michiko Kakutani, Roth’s fellow Pulitzer winner that year—it, too, disparaged the novel as “hogtied to a narrow, personal agenda,” the targets of which “are not transformed . . . into plausible or compelling fiction.”
Among the more favorable reviews was one by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the New York Observer; Roth was especially pleased by the caption beneath a photo of himself, which he quoted in a letter to his editor, Wendy Strothman: “ ‘PR, who understands how politics may serve as mask and outlet for extra-political resentments and obsessions.’ . . . PR understands how book reviews may serve as mask and outlet for resentments and obsessions too.” He was, at any rate, further consoled by a long, appreciative notice in the New York Review by Robert Stone, who applauded Communist as “a bitter, often funny, always engrossing story that wonderfully evokes a time and a place in our common past.”
As a preemptive strike against old lefty friends who were apt to find Ira Ringold an unflattering reflection of their own susceptibilities, Roth incorporated the same verbatim sentiment into various letters: “if gullibility (that is, unforgivable naiveté about the horrors of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian thuggery) wasn’t the major idiocy of the American left, I don’t know what was.” Besides, he believed that Ira’s own gullibility was particularized/extenuated by his hardscrabble childhood, richly evoked, which left him “an easy mark for the utopian vision,” as Zuckerman reflects. Roth was especially proud of the canary funeral, a virtuosic set piece that “was most thrilling to write,” he said, and that he’d “stake [his] longevity on.” As with Swede’s tour of the glove factory, the funeral was based on meticulous research (an actual event in Newark history), but what pleased Roth, as ever, was its potency as fiction: while the elaborate obsequies for an Italian cobbler’s canary, Jimmy, leave most of the crowd in stitches, little Ira isn’t “in on the joke” and weeps inconsolably, thereafter dubbed “Boo-hoo Ringold. The Jewboy who cried at the canary funeral.” Thus the nature of Ira’s alienation is picturesquely defined. He will forever identify with the weak and helpless thing—a tendency shared by his creator (“Don’t step on the underdog”)—hence his attraction to the likes of Eve Frame and the Communist party. Nor will the memory of his childhood humiliations ever go away, and beneath the polished façade of Iron Rinn, the Lincoln-impersonating radio celebrity, remains an unstable lout who once beat a man to death with a shovel.
Roth understood “how politics may serve as mask and outlet for extra-political resentments” regardless of ideology. As Murray Ringold explains to Zuckerman, the HUAC committee member most responsible for getting him fired from his teaching job was Bryden Grant—Katrina’s odious husband—the same person who nominally cowrote (“as told to”) the book that destroyed the career of Murray’s brother, I Married a Communist. Murray traces the Grants’ undying spite to a seemingly trivial episode at a party on West Eleventh Street, when Ira referred to the right-wing Bryden as “a pal of Wernher von Braun’s”: “The whole squabble took three minutes,” says Murray, “but according to Ira, three minutes that sealed his fate and mine.” Similarly, Roth would forever believe that a Katrina Grant–like figure was at least the partial ghostwriter of Doll’s House, since he couldn’t imagine Bloom coming up with certain characterizations any more than Eve Frame would be apt to call her gullible husband “a Machiavellian Communist, a vicious man of enormous cunning”—though she was certainly apt to pander to her daughter in whatever terms: “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything so heroic in my life as my young daughter, who loved nothing so much as to sit quietly all day playing her harp, arguing strenuously in defense of American democracy against this Communist madman and his Stalinist, totalitarian lies.” Politics may also provide a mask for failings one can’t otherwise bear to acknowledge. As Murray explains Eve’s self-exculpatory reasoning, “I didn’t lose my husband because of the horrible trap I’m in with my daughter. I didn’t lose my husband because of all those kneeling ‘I implore you’s.’ . . . It has to be grander than that—and I must be blameless. . . . I lost my husband to Communism.”
At bottom the novel is a bildungsroman—a portrait of the artist as a young man taking wobbly steps toward maturity and a kind of bleak wisdom. As a teenager Zuckerman writes radio plays glorifying the “little guy,” inspired by Norman Corwin’s On a Note of Triumph and his friendship with the manly Communist Ira.‡‡ This phase of his education ends with college, when an admired instructor at the University of Chicago, Leo Glucksman, denounces Nathan’s Corwinesque melodrama, The Stooge of Torquemada, as “crude, primitive, simple-minded, propagandistic crap.” Speaking to students, Roth described his narrator’s process of apprenticeship as “the struggle to change oneself, then the struggle to change others, and then to change the system”—casting off mentors along the way, and “thus making way for the orphanhood that is total,” as Zuckerman puts it, “which is manhood.” Finally the ninety-year-old Murray declares, “You cannot change anything”—an insight born of his own long education.
“Early on,” said Roth, “I discovered the story would be told by two people”—Murray and Nathan—“who sort of pass the ball back and forth.” The two accounts are meant to be mutually illuminating: Nathan remembers the Ira he idolized as a boy—Iron Rinn, the idealistic radio celebrity—while Murray tells of his brother’s childhood and later, terrible decline, until both realize they didn’t know the same man. Murray and Nathan talk to (at?) each other while sitting in the dark outside Nathan’s house in the Berkshires, and their disembodied voices seem an apt way of telling a story about the radio era; but the actual effect is a clumsy one, perhaps the main reason (among others) that I Married a Communist is easily the weakest of Roth’s American Trilogy. In The Human Stain, we learn toward the end of the novel that Zuckerman’s earlier account of Coleman Silk’s youth was based on his conversation with the man’s sister, Ernestine, after Silk’s funeral—but meanwhile her memories have been crafted into proper narrative scenes, versus the endless, unlovely yammering in Communist. “So, you see, Ira repeated to Pamela that stuff I’d told him at the outset about Sylphid but that he’d refused to take seriously coming from me,” Murray explains, tediously, of his implausible omniscience—that is, how he came to infer the substance of a conversation (one of many) he never witnessed. And whereas Swede Levov expresses himself with improbable eloquence for the valid reason that he’s a figment of Zuckerman’s imagination—something a good reader never quite forgets—Murray is simply a cardboard sage who happens to talk a lot like his creator: “For stupidity, you know, there is no cure,” he says of Katrina Grant. “The woman is the very embodiment of moral ambition, and the perniciousness of it, and the folly of it”—this after hours and hours of late-night maundering. (“I better settle down,” he remarks a hundred-plus pages earlier. “I’m ninety years old.”)
Still, Roth was satisfied that he’d managed to capture the essence of his ex-wife, though he was surprised and a little disappointed that “not a single reviewer” remarked on Eve’s anti-Semitism. Nor did Bloom dispute the characterization legally, perhaps because of the so-called “small penis rule” (mentioned by Dinitia Smith): that is, fiction writers can protect themselves from libel suits by ascribing a small penis (or its equivalent) to a given character, since the real-life model is unlikely to announce “That character with the very small penis, that’s me!” Roth wasn’t taking chances, though: when their mutual friend Gaia Servadio assured him he’d gotten Bloom “exactly” right in the book, Roth said, “Put it all in writing—and not your terrible handwriting; type it, and send it to me!” As for Bloom’s own thoughts on the matter, they may be gleaned in part from a 2004 article in The Independent, “Claire Bloom: The Human Pain” (a pun on Roth’s title, and perhaps a commentary on Bloom herself). “No!” she whispered, clutching at her collar, when an interviewer described Eve Frame to her as a “self-loathing, anti-Semitic Jewess, [who] fawns over shallow society figures, [and] endures physical attacks from her overweight and vengeful daughter.” Bloom confessed she’d never read her ex-husband’s novel (“Every time I saw a copy, I felt sick or faint”), adding (“As if thinking aloud”) that she still woke up “absolutely terrified” from nightmares about him.