CHAPTER
Forty-Two
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1997, ROTH WAS WALKING ALONG Columbus Avenue when a young man across the street yelled, “Are you America’s greatest writer?” “Living,” Roth replied. The young man proved to be George Stephanopoulos, who mentioned that Chelsea Clinton was back from Stanford for the holidays and working on a paper about American Pastoral. The following summer Roth met the Clintons on Martha’s Vineyard, where he was visiting the Styrons: “Is your friend all right?” the president inquired of Dongala, remembering Roth’s letter of a few months before. Bill Clinton had just come from being exhaustively grilled about the Lewinsky affair for the edification of millions (the cigar, etc.), and looked “like shit,” thought Roth, who offered to help Chelsea with any future papers she may write about his work. “She doesn’t need any help,” Hillary interjected.
Apparently Roth made a good impression, since the president picked his name from a list of nominees to receive the National Medal of Arts that November, along with the likes of Gregory Peck and Fats Domino. Roth’s entourage for the festive event included Golier, Sandy, the Maneas, Ross Miller, and Conarroe. Beneath a big tent on the South Lawn of the White House, Bill Clinton said of Roth, “What James Joyce did for Dublin, what William Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Philip Roth has done for Newark.” As Conarroe recalled, “Philip flinched ever so slightly” at the last sentence of the president’s citation: “Who would have thought that the brash kid from Newark would someday become the grand old man of American literature?” “Not as old as you think, Mr. President,” Roth murmured as he came to retrieve his medallion, and Clinton, laughing, returned to the lectern and said to the crowd, “Do you know what he told me? ‘I’m not as old as you think.’ So I told him, ‘Don’t worry, Philip, it’s just a literary expression.’ ”
“I WRITE FROM eight o’clock in the morning until one,” said Bellow. “Then I go out and make my mistakes.” One of Roth’s pleasant afternoon errands was getting his mail at the Cornwall Bridge post office, and one day in June 1998 he encountered “a rather arresting-looking, tall, lanky young woman in her thirties, with reddish-brown hair, who smilingly introduced herself” as Sylvia.* She knew who he was, and asked if he’d autograph a book; she worked next door to the post office, as a telephone dispatcher for an electrical repair company. When Roth stopped by to sign her book the next day, she mentioned a second job at a dairy farm that sold raw milk. Roth was just starting The Human Stain, and had vaguely conceived a love interest for Coleman Silk that needed fleshing out: “Can I come out and watch you?” he asked, and on June 27 he sat on a bench in the milking row (as Coleman does in the novel) watching the skinny woman, in shorts and a T-shirt, gamely shoving the cows around.
One morning Kathy Meetz arrived for work and there was a young woman at the breakfast table with Roth. “They had a really nice rapport,” she remembered. Roth was squeamish about vermin (“mice or quick little bugs”), and the sassy Sylvia would tease him about being chicken; once, when a bat got into the house, Roth cringed while she calmly caught it with a towel and let it go outside. The name of her fictional counterpart, Faunia, was inspired by her affinity with animals and wild things generally, especially hawks and crows, at which the woman would squawk and caw while walking around Roth’s land. Once, she took him along to meet the love of her life, Princess (called Prince in Roth’s novel), a tame crow at the local Audubon center. Roth admired her moxie, all the more as she revealed, gradually, what she was up against—“the futility,” as he put it, “that had been on her tail since she fled her pussycrazy stepfather at 14.” Despite the blue-collar trappings of her life, Sylvia had grown up in the affluent Westchester town of Pound Ridge. Her mother, a former model and fashion director at a department store, refused to believe her when she accused her stepfather, a manufacturing executive, of fondling her and finally trying to rape her. After running away from home, she drifted from state to state before marrying a local farmer; now divorced, she had two children—“a sad fucked up little boy and girl” whom Roth had met in passing one weekend, “when they were allowed up for an hour from Roxbury to visit their fallen mom.”
As Roth would presently learn, she’d lost custody of her children because she was an alcoholic with multiple DUI convictions; in fact, she’d definitively lost custody when she was arrested for DUI and child endangerment, having driven to her ex-husband’s house “drunk out of her mind” (according to her brother), with her three (not two) children in the car. For a long time Roth knew nothing of this; in his company she rarely had more than half a glass of wine with dinner, and usually avoided sleeping over. Indeed, it was Roth’s impression that this “cultural primitive” possessed a profound if nascent sensibility. When she visited on Sunday nights, he’d usually be listening to chamber music, and she’d raptly turn in her chair and stare at the speakers; the next time he was in the city, Roth made a point of stopping by Tower Records to buy her a collection of twenty-five CDs. Like Faunia, too, she’d murmur, “That’s the ticket” when he penetrated her during sex, and on New Year’s Eve (“which we spent largely in bed, fucking everywhichway [sic] and drinking good wine”) she became “strangely and childishly frightened” when he suggested it was time to go home. He let her sleep in a spare room, and only later discovered she didn’t have a driver’s license and was afraid of being intercepted by state troopers—out in force that night—during the twenty-minute drive back to Sharon.
“I don’t think he has a real sense of what it means to be an addict,” said Roth’s worldly cleaner, Meetz. “I don’t think he understands the depth of what that does to people.” Roth was apt to concede his naiveté on that point and certain others: “I’m still from 385 Leslie Street,” he liked to say, when it came to homosexuality, violence, and alcoholism. In other words he was inclined to believe Sylvia when she told him—“with a wry acceptance of the shitty world”—about all the men who’d beaten and abandoned her, including the son of her psychotherapist, no less, whose abuse was so hideous she’d fled to the Susan B. Anthony Project for battered women in Torrington. Some of this might have been true, though her brother had reason to be skeptical. “She suffered from alcohol dependence and major depression,” he pointed out, “but she always refused therapy.” Contrary to what she’d told Roth, she hadn’t run away from home at age fourteen, given that she was at least nineteen when she accused her stepfather of trying to seduce her; it was true her mother had chosen to believe her husband’s denials, but so too did her brother (a gay activist who, alone in his family, maintained decent relations with his sister over the years): “[Sylvia] always had to be the center of attention,” he said.
Roth thought her ultimate downfall began when she was injured in a car wreck and had to get an operation on her cervical spine. Afterward she complained of terrible pain, and Roth sent her to his local internist, whom he sent a series of alarmed faxes that spring: “URGENT! MEDICAL EMERGENCY / Your patient and my friend [Sylvia]——is in a medical emergency,” Roth faxed him on March 17, 1999, when Roth was in New York recovering from surgery on his carotid artery. Sylvia had told him over the phone that she was depressed and wanted to die, and he knew she’d lost some twenty-five pounds since her operation. He talked her into eating “half a container of yogurt, two spears of asparagus, and a glass of orange juice,” he informed the doctor. “That was her first food in two days.” The next day Roth faxed the man again, urging him to send an ambulance, and on April 4 he tried one more time: “[Sylvia’s] case continues to spiral rapidly out of control. I learned just this evening, Sunday, that she was carried out of her house on Saturday by a neighbor and taken to Sharon Hospital with seizures. The diagnosis was drug withdrawal.” That last detail might have suggested why the doctor was reluctant to get involved, but in any event Roth was disgusted and stopped seeing him as a result.
Roth went directly to check on her when he returned to Connecticut, and found her “staggering around her house and speaking with a slurred voice.” During the six or seven hours they subsequently spent at the Sharon Hospital emergency room, a social worker interviewed them and Roth learned, at last, that Sylvia had been mixing painkillers with large quantities of alcohol. Sharon “didn’t have the resources to deal with a patient like her,” and Roth was told to take her to Charlotte Hungerford Hospital in Torrington, where, after another long wait—he pacing the floor while she glowered at him from a wheelchair—she was admitted to the psychiatric ward. Roth returned the next afternoon and entreated her “to get off the booze if not the painkillers,” but she was furious and refused to speak to him. “She was like a surly child,” he recalled. “She was nothing like the witty, straight-shooting, and stoical woman I’d known.” The psychiatrist in charge told him they couldn’t keep her against her will (“and frankly they didn’t think they could do anything for her anyway”), and Roth ended up driving her home in silence.
In the past Sylvia had refused to accept money from Roth, except for five hundred dollars she’d “borrowed” at Christmas to buy presents for her children. As her situation grew more desperate, though, Roth was determined to keep her afloat, though they’d stopped sleeping together and rarely spoke. When she lost both her jobs after neck surgery, Roth stopped by the electrical repair company and arranged to keep paying premiums for her COBRA insurance. He also arranged for a South Carolina lawyer to send her anonymous monthly stipends—two thousand dollars for March and April, one thousand for May, five hundred thereafter—because he knew she had relatives in the state and wanted her to think the money came from one of them. Meanwhile, too, he had Meetz deliver a weekly box of groceries to her latest digs, a cabin near Kent Falls, where she usually refused to open the door; Meetz would leave the box on her steps.
Roth heard rumors she was living with a shady laborer named Nick, and toward the end of May he paid her a visit and insisted she tell him the truth. “What I heard is very distressing,” he wrote Ross Miller, “and I want to pass the information on to you so that you have a record, in case something violent does occur.” Roth had met this Nick fellow, who once came to do work at his house; “Charlton Heston”—then president of the National Rifle Association—“Is My President” read the bumper sticker on his truck. Sylvia claimed the man had been beating her—even while she was wearing a cervical collar after surgery—and now he was “on the warpath” and might come after Roth. “The imagination’s logic,” Roth mused (alluding to a favorite Flaubertian maxim), since he’d already conjured the man as Les Farley in The Human Stain, and so surmised that he, Roth, might be in real danger. Wylie referred him to Rushdie’s American security firm, whose consultant advised him just to leave town for a while until things cooled off.
Sylvia’s brother had known Nick, the gun-nut boyfriend, and didn’t think he was abusive (“though it probably wasn’t a healthy relationship” since the two shared a fondness for liquor and drugs). “Philip Roth seems a nice man,” he said. “He was trying to be helpful, and he found [Sylvia’s] story compelling. If you’re someone like [Sylvia], the one thing you want is someone who’ll listen to you.” By October 1999, anyway, she seemed to be over the worst of her troubles, and one day she left Roth a loaf of bread from Stroble’s Bakery in Kent, along with a little note:
. . . I will be forever grateful for all you have done for me.
I hope, or should I say, my wish is that some day, I can thank you in person.
Peace, Love, & Crows, [S.] : )
Her optimism was premature. On November 2, she was arrested for drunk driving again, this time without a license. A few weeks later she phoned Roth and said she was penniless (“Can’t afford to buy shampoo”). He asked what had happened to her monthly check ($500), and she said the abusive boyfriend had cashed it and given her all of fifty bucks. “I’m going to pack it in,” she said in a tearful voice.
At Roth’s request, Meetz got in touch with the woman’s mother in Pound Ridge, explaining that Sylvia was in a bad way and might die without some kind of intervention. “I can’t do anything for her,” said the mother, who shed a bit more light on things. In 1982, the nineteen-year-old Sylvia had married a young man in Florida (a Jew named Philip, it so happened) and had a son; needing help with the baby, the young couple soon moved to the environs of Pound Ridge, whereupon Sylvia “dropped off the planet” (as her brother put it), leaving the baby with her husband (also nineteen), until Sylvia’s parents gained emergency custody and raised the boy as their own. There was also at least one other child (in addition to the three in Roxbury) who’d lived “fifteen or sixteen days” until her death from SIDS—or so Sylvia always told it, though her brother believed she’d fallen asleep drunk and rolled on top of the baby. Sylvia’s present woes, anyway, were taken out of Roth’s hands when she was duly convicted of her latest DUI (the fourth) and sent to the women’s state prison in Niantic for six months.
ON APRIL 17, 1999—while the smoke cleared after his latest angioplasty and recent trips to the ER with Sylvia—Roth reported to Solotaroff that he was 250 pages into The Human Stain, which was the only thing he wanted to think about: “I work up here day and night, it’s bliss, pure bliss, what I should have been doing all my life and would have been doing if only it hadn’t been for stupid p—k [sic].” During a 2004 interview, Ross Miller asked Roth whether he’d ever worked so close to his present experience as he had while evoking Sylvia on the page as Faunia Farley; Roth replied that he’d paid particular attention to her “matter-offact irony” (as when she told him about the time she’d cleaned up after a gunshot suicide, an experience he promptly gave to Faunia) and “vocal style,” which he’d worked into Faunia’s “crow monologue and dance-for-me monologue.” “I don’t know where she comes from, really,” he said of Faunia during a 2003 interview with David Remnick; he mentioned there were a lot of crows on his property and so he thought, more or less randomly, “Why can’t she too be interested in crows?”
Back when he’d been finishing I Married a Communist, it had occurred to Roth that he was writing a trilogy about postwar America, and soon he began casting about for another era that had affected him in some vital way—hitting on the present moment (“Treat ’98 as though it were ’48; treat ’98 as if it were ’68”), when Bill Clinton was being “tarred and feathered.” “In 1998,” he told the Times two years later, “you had the illusion that you were suddenly able to know this huge, unknowable country, to catch a glimpse of its moral core. What was being enacted on the public stage seemed to have the concentrated power of a great work of literature. The work I’m thinking of is The Scarlet Letter.” Given his own pillorying in the wake of Doll’s House (not to say his somewhat reckless conduct of late), Roth felt vaguely implicated in the president’s humiliations and made the following notes about his novel in progress:
Very upset and can’t understand it . . .
Sexual hysteria . . .
Turning men into contrite boys
Hysterical fear of the dick
. . . The Great Purity Binge
My subject from the beginning.
The Pure vs. the Impure
. . . Feminism as the new righteousness . . .
Women are blameless.
When an interviewer for Le Figaro later asked Roth whether his novel was a “polemic” against American political correctness, Roth said “it’s not polemical at all. It’s representational.” The beginning of Coleman Silk’s disgrace, for example—the accusation of racism (“spooks”) that eventually leads to the even more damning accusation that he’s “sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half [his] age”—was closely based on an episode in the life of Roth’s friend Mel Tumin. During the fall of 1976, two students had failed to appear for the first four weeks of Tumin’s Sociology 332D precept at Princeton:† “Does anyone know these people?” he’d finally asked his fourteen students. “Do they exist or are they spooks?” As Tumin (and Silk, in so many words) would explain amid the inquisition that followed, “I was referring to their possibly ectoplasmic character. I had no idea what color they might be.” It turned out the two students were African American women, whom Tumin advised at midterm to drop out, since they were both getting Fs in his course: “It was better, he felt, for me to ‘drop out’ than to ‘flunk out,’ ” one of the young women wrote in her statement. “After all, he said, I would be able to get back in (the University) as I was black and also a woman, and black women being rarities at Princeton, always got back in.” Both women had elected to remain in Tumin’s class, and one claimed to have attended “religiously” after the professor’s warning; meanwhile she learned from a classmate that Tumin had referred to her, on separate occasions, as a “spook” and a “wretch”—the latter insult arising as follows: Tumin had assigned the two women a fifteen-page paper summarizing the readings and lectures they’d missed, for which they took reserved books out of the library and deliberately held on to them until the end of the semester. “We took that into consideration,” one of them said, impertinently, when Tumin asked whether they were aware that their classmates had also needed the books to study for final exams. Hence “wretches.”
Lois Hinckley, an assistant professor on the board of advisers, reported that one of the two students had three Fs that semester, but should be allowed to remain at Princeton because of her “real effort”—in Tumin’s class especially—“to reform: going to class and lecture, doing the work, studying hard for the exam and, more important, a genuine change in her attitude, which was not, I gather, matched by any change on the professor’s side.” This student made Tumin’s “discriminatory behavior” the basis of her appeal. A piquant irony in all this (albeit not as piquant as the one Roth would contrive for his novel) may be inferred by Tumin’s 1994 obituary headline in The New York Times: “Melvin M. Tumin, 75, Specialist in Race Relations.” In the novel, Herb Keble, a black colleague who owes his career to Coleman Silk, tells him, “I can’t be with you on this”—the same words used by a black colleague who was similarly beholden to Tumin. In a letter to the deans overseeing the inquiry (one of whom was Neil Rudenstine, later president of Harvard), Tumin addressed certain misconceptions and moreover pointed out that his two truant students never did produce their makeup work, much less attend classes “religiously”—et cetera: “Must I go on? This is sickening.” At length Tumin was exonerated—six months after referring to the ectoplasmic characters of students he’d never seen—whereupon he wrote a “gratified” letter to the deans, deploring, however, “the ease with which any faculty member can apparently be made subject of an inquiry on the basis of flimsy allegations by a desperate student.”
Roth had long wanted to use the incident in his fiction, but figured it was a little too typical and needed another turn of the screw: “And then it dawned on me that the guy should be black, a pale-skinned black,” he remembered in 2011—at least a little inspired here, again, by Tumin, who was sometimes reputed to be black because he was (as Roth described Silk) “one of those crimped-haired Jews of a light yellowish skin pigmentation.” Roth gave a late draft of his novel to a black acquaintance from Newark, the social activist Barbara Bell Coleman, and over lunch she said most of his details about the young Coleman’s family life seemed accurate. She did mention a light-skinned cousin of hers whose soft hair—“blow hair”—she’d envied as a child, and Roth put that expression into his novel. As for Steena Paulsson, the statuesque white girl Coleman brings home to meet his family, Roth was thinking of a poet with whom he’d had a fling at Yaddo some thirty years before, Freya Manfred, who remained a friend and later gave him details over the phone about her tiny Scandinavian hometown in Minnesota. Afterward she read The Human Stain and recognized her remarks almost verbatim (“It’s unusual, Fergus Falls, because it has the Otter Tail Lake just to the east, and not far from our house it has the Otter Tail River”), and Roth apologized for taping her without her knowledge.
ALONG WITH ROTH’S daily trips to the post office, other reasons for leaving his desk and relieving his loneliness included visits to David Plante’s Columbia class that spring of 1999 and to Norman Manea’s Bard class in the fall. Walking along the pathway outside Dodge Hall, Roth ran into a tall, fetching young woman with an Australian accent: “Hello,” she said. “Are you Mr. Roth?” She offered to show him to Plante’s class, and he got the impression she’d been waiting for him. After he seated himself with the other students around a large oval table, Roth glanced at his guide again—call her Margot—and noticed that she’d removed her sweater: “As well she should have,” he said, “because she had lovely large breasts and I put them into The Dying Animal.”
The main thing about their affair that would prove useful to his fiction, however, was the fierce jealousy it aroused—“for the first time in my life,” said Roth—all the fiercer given his strong suspicion that the twenty-six-year-old had better things to do, at least sexually. While living in London, Roth had befriended the Australian comedian Barry Humphries (“Come to London,” he wrote Dick Stern in 1979, “and I will take you to the theater to see a brilliant female impersonator named Barry Humphries who’s not queer”), and that fall he took Margot to the Dame Edna show on Broadway; afterward he introduced her to the comedian backstage, and the next day Humphries gave his fellow Aussie a call and took her out to dinner. “You are a bad boy, Barry,” the bedeviled Roth scolded him. “It was like taking out my niece,” Humphries laughed (“which,” said Roth, “didn’t convince me of anything either way”). Nor did it help Roth’s jealousy that the young woman proved vastly talented as a writer. He recommended her novel to Wylie, who promptly made a six-figure deal for British and North American rights.
“I’m sure that she was wildly ambitious,” said one of Roth’s subsequent girlfriends, who heard a lot more about Margot than she would have ideally liked. “He asks her out, she ends up in bed with him, he introduces her to his agent—” Here the woman burst into gleeful laughter: “Then she leaves.” In The Dying Animal, Kepesh figures the young Consuela had only “experimented” with him, a much older man, “to see how overwhelming her breasts could be”—though in fact the real-life Margot was deeply fond of Roth. As he winningly admitted, however, she soon made it clear she didn’t want to sleep with him anymore, and abruptly decided, at last, to get off a bus at Port Authority rather than spend another weekend in Connecticut with him. “That was the end,” said Roth, who nonetheless remained interested in her literary career back in Australia, and even renewed a tender friendship, later, during her occasional visits to the States.
Nowadays Roth felt out of sympathy with academia, not least because of the “terrible xenophobia and philistinism that calls itself ‘multiculturalism,’ ” as he had written Bob Brustein back in 1991. Eight years later, Roth visited an exhibit at the New York Public Library, “The Hallmarks of 20th Century American Literature,” and “blew [his] stack.” As he subsequently protested to Paul LeClerc, the president of the library (a job Roth had helped him get), it was nothing less than “an outrage” to feature the likes of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Edna St. Vincent Millay but make no mention whatever of Hemingway, Faulkner, or Robert Lowell. And multiculturalism was, for Roth, but one facet of a larger repugnancy: “You used to be able to sleep with the girls in the old days,” he grumbled to Bellow. “And now of course it’s impossible. You go to feminist prison; you serve twenty years to life. And it makes Joliet look like nothin’ . . .” Mickey Sabbath—as an enduring protest against this state of affairs—considers leaving a bequest for a $500 annual college prize given to the female student who’s “fucked more male faculty members than any other graduating senior during her undergraduate years.”
Such was the Roth who came to Bard College, in the fall of 1999, for what would prove his final extensive teaching experience. As the subject of Manea’s Contemporary Masters course, which met twelve times that semester to cover six of Roth’s novels (Portnoy’s Complaint, The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife, Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral, and I Married a Communist), Roth would appear on Tuesdays to discuss salient themes and field questions from the fifteen or so students—this as a follow-up to Monday discussions headed by Manea, who later speculated (according to Roth) that his female students had been riled up by a certain “disagreeable feminist faculty member.” In any case, Roth would call his friend every Monday evening to find out how things had gone with a particular novel; Manea seemed a little worried after the Sabbath session, but thought he’d “managed to tame the class” by reminding them, after all, that Drenka was every bit as nasty/interesting as Sabbath. (“A response to puritanical feminism,” Roth had written in his teaching notes about the novel, which includes a scene where Sabbath looks over the classroom jottings of Deborah Cowan, the girl whose panties he steals: “Class criticized poem [Yeats’s “Meru”] for its lack of a woman’s perspective,” she wrote. “Note unconscious gender privileging—his terror, his glory, his (phallic) monuments.”) Manea may have stemmed the tide Sabbath-wise, but the water was lapping over the flood walls by the time his students read I Married a Communist. “I’m still doubtful,” Roth said to Manea on the phone that Monday night, when the nervous Romanian ventured that things had seemed—well, turbulent but “okay.”
Class was videotaped the next day—the final meeting—and open to the public, and before a full house Roth lost no time getting down to business. Manea had warned him, he said, that things had gotten a little heated (not for the first time) over “the portrayal of women” in his novel. “This is a woman who betrays her husband,” he said of Eve Frame,
and I invented her. But I did not invent Linda Tripp.‡ Pamela Solomon [a friend of Sylphid] is a woman who has a dalliance with this man [Ira] who is impressive to her.
He’s older, he has stature, he’s heroic . . . and when things get hot for her she does what she can to save her skin. I invented Pamela Solomon but I didn’t invent Monica Lewinsky. . . . I have to tell you that I accept any literary judgment having to do with the persuasiveness of the presentation, but I really cannot be told what I have a right to portray and what I don’t have a right to portray. And I have no patience for it. . . .
The great thing about literature is, it doesn’t matter if you like Emma Bovary or don’t like her. Only one thing matters: Is she interesting? Do you like Raskolnikov? Or do you not like Raskolnikov? It’s irrelevant. He’s a murderer . . . it’s kid stuff. How many of you were engaged by Raskolnikov, and how many of you weren’t? . . . We don’t have to have easy moralizing reactions to characters in literature. . . .
There’s something agitating, disturbing, questionable in the presentation of these women. Never in the presentation of the men. Sabbath is perfectly all right with you—this crazy cocksman. Fine. Ira? Violent, kills somebody? Fine. But there’s something “wrong” in the presentation of Hope Lonoff, who doesn’t want to leave this bad marriage she’s in. Seems to be insufficiently forceful, assertive. . . . Isn’t Sylphid assertive enough for you? Isn’t Katrina Van Tassel Grant assertive enough? Plenty assertive. It’s not so pretty.
A female student suggested it was more a matter of flat and round characters: Roth’s male characters have an invariable roundness (“Sabbath can be the most corrupt—but we can sympathize with him because he’s such a round character”), but in regard to Roth’s women, “I’m not feeling, like, roundness from them, or complexity or sympathy.” Roth asked her whether she considered Anne Frank/Amy Bellette to be flat, whereupon another young woman politely (but wrongly in terms of Roth’s example) remarked that readers are “never inside” the heads of his female characters. “Aren’t you interested in how men perceive women?” Roth asked her. “I’m interested in how women perceive men.” A young man named Bernie, with a diffident tremor in his voice, attempted at length to clarify the matter. He was directing a play, he said, that “conformed to certain stereotypical conceptions of gender,” and surely great art should “challenge” such types: “If perhaps you [Roth] could play with certain elements more, you know, by— . . .” “I don’t buy any of this, Bernie,” Roth said, genially enough. “You were very careful, you were excruciatingly careful in narrating this story which is a measure of how intimidating the atmosphere is. . . . I don’t think this has to do with flat and round characters.” Roth then produced a book, On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky and Daniel, about the 1965 trial of two Soviet writers who were sent to a forced-labor camp for “slandering” the state in their work. Roth explained that Andrey Sinyavsky had written a satirical fable, The Makepeace Experiment, in which provincial Russians pretend, for instance, that toothpaste is caviar because their leader tells them so. “The judge didn’t want to hear about satire or fantasy or hyperbole or playfulness or humor or the make-believe aspect of literature,” said Roth; “all he wanted to know was: ‘Why do you slander Lenin?’ ” Among the people in the Bard lecture hall that day was the writer Francine Prose, who noted that On Trial henceforth became her “favorite out-of-print book,” given its invaluable lesson that “a fictional character is an individual and not a symbol of an entire gender or class or race, and one can criticize or satirize a society without being unpatriotic or seditious.”
The book, however, didn’t do Roth any favors that day. “I think we need to make an important distinction,” said a not-so-diffident student named Lauren, “that we don’t want to arrest you and put you on trial.” Another young woman returned to the “question of roundness”: “I think that it’s important to maybe understand that for people our age, for women . . . most of the literature that we’re exposed to and read growing up is about men.” “I grew up in an extremely Jewish environment,” Roth countered. “And when I read English literature there were no Jews in it—except in T. S. Eliot there were Jews to make fun of. . . . Do I have to read books with just Jews in them? What would I have read? Sholem Aleichem until the cows come home?” Amid a nervous ripple of laughter, Roth pressed on: flatness versus roundness, he said, is “a very elementary distinction,” and perhaps now they could finally move on to what is present in his work rather than what may or may not be (“Isn’t it boring after a while?”).
But the class ended before other topics could be broached, and for the most part everyone seemed relieved. As for Roth, he’d maintained an air of good-humored civility throughout, but brooded and brooded afterward and seemed to grow increasingly bitter about things. Chatting with Bellow a couple weeks later, he said that young people’s “aesthetic antennae have been cut” so that they only recognize the “political uses” of literature. Indeed he blamed the man-hating faculty “harpies” who corrupted such students, especially female students, and especially with respect to the work of Philip Roth, who wasn’t about to lie down for these detractors. When he heard, in 2002, that Smith College had withdrawn permission for producers of The Human Stain to shoot on campus, allegedly because some of the dialogue was deemed offensive, Roth fired off a letter to President Carol Christ, wondering whether his novel (whence much of the dialogue was derived) had also been banned at Smith: “It’s hard for me to believe that would be so, but I would appreciate it if you’d be kind enough to let me know if it is.” And such matters continued to rankle twelve years later, when a teacher at St. Paul’s Girls’ School, in London, wrote Roth a friendly letter informing him that her students (“eight sharp and witty feminist critics”) were reading American Pastoral in terms of “ideology, myth, intertextuality, gender and ambivalence.” “I regret to tell you,” Roth replied, “that the words ‘ideology, myth, intertextuality, gender and ambivalence’ make my flesh crawl.”
BY 2004, Roth’s work appeared in thirty-one languages, and he informed a writer from Time that he was “not involved in the process of translation” except a little with his French translator, Josée Kamoun. Roth was “not involved” insofar as he spoke no language other than English; otherwise he was involved to the utmost degree. In the early days, to be sure, Roth had been remiss enough to allow his Italian publisher (then Bompiani) to translate his first book as La ragazza di Tony—i.e., Tony’s Girl, which omitted the five short stories and renamed Neil Klugman in accordance with the revamped title. By 1981, Roth had a keener sense of his place in world literature, and when he learned at the last minute (from Kundera) that his French translator had misunderstood a Tolstoy reference at the end of The Ghost Writer (“It’s like being married to Tolstoy,” says Lonoff, about to pursue his fleeing wife), Roth wrote an irate letter to his august publisher, Claude Gallimard: “I now understand that this same translator is working on Zuckerman Unbound!”—and that wasn’t the half of it: Only two of his books (Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy) were available in French paperback editions, and if Gallimard would not agree to reprint most of Roth’s backlist to coincide with his forthcoming Zuckerman Trilogy, he would have no choice but to seek another publisher. Gallimard replied that his translator, Henri Robillot, had been much acclaimed for his work on Portnoy et son complexe and other Roth titles: “I wish I could convince you, dear Philip Roth, that we feel a deep attachment to your books. According to me, publishing the Grand Roman Americain [The Great American Novel] should have been a living proof of that; because, in spite of its obvious qualities, the French public had a difficult approach to that book.” Roth stayed with Gallimard.§
In due course Roth put a system in place whereby his translators passed along their work (via Wylie’s office) to handpicked authorities in various languages—including trusted friends such as Jacquie Rogers (French) and Aaron Asher’s daughter Abigail (Italian)—who would make corrections and suggestions which Roth himself would then consider before preparing his own copious remarks. With Kamoun he had particular rapport, and for The Dying Animal he read the book aloud to her so she could get a better sense of the cadence and idioms of his first-person narrator. He also worked closely with his Swedish translator, Nancy Westman, who queried him as to a synonym for “base” apropos of Sabbath’s remark, “I love your base qualities.” After reviewing the manifold nuances of “base” according to The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (pressed on all his translators), Roth came to the point: “Sabbath is being playful with Nikki when he says he likes her base qualities, since she is almost singularly without any. Lighten up, sweetheart.”
In 2000, Roth was described as “the biggest American export since David Hasselhoff” by New York magazine, which noted no fewer than three recent documentaries about the novelist in France, England, and Germany. Nowhere would Roth be more embraced than in France, thanks in part to critics such as Le Monde’s Josyane Savigneau, who insisted Roth was more than just the bawdy comic who’d written Portnoy. “This is only a guess,” said Roth, when asked about his fame in France, “but I think they think that reading my books they’re finding out something about America that they don’t know and that they want to know.” American Pastoral had established Roth as a major writer in France, and if anything The Human Stain would prove an even bigger success—a definitive indictment of the curious (to the French) puritanism that had led to the impeachment of a popular and admirable president. Even the hip left-wing magazine Les Inrocks¶ was clamoring for an interview, which Roth had refused at first (“I seem to have entered the post-interrogation period of my life”), until he was won over by its young literary editor, Marc Weitzmann, who began their interview in typically Gallic fashion. “My questions were very systematics [sic] and theoretic,” he remembered, “until he stopped me and said ‘I do not think that way’—to which I answered, ‘Actually, neither do I’—I threw away my notes and started to ask the first thing I could think of and things got smoother.”
Roth had a chance to bask in the adoration of the French en masse in October 1999, when he became only the third writer in nineteen years to be honored as the sole subject of the Book Festival of Aix-en-Provence, attended by more than twenty thousand people—another occasion he’d been inclined to forgo, until his Francophile friend Judith Thurman talked him into it. She acted as translator when Roth met with the festival director, Annie Terrier, to work out a format for the four-day program. Roth was especially eager to ameliorate what he considered French cultural condescension (“this stupid bullshit about ‘McDonald’s America’ ”) and made sure the festival was as much about twentieth-century American art as it was about him and his work. Dan Talbot of Manhattan’s Lincoln Plaza Cinema suggested five essential documentaries to screen (e.g., Frederick Wiseman’s Welfare), and Leon Botstein helped arrange an American chamber music concert featuring the work of Barber, Copland, and others. Roth was especially pleased with the contribution of his librarian friend, Charles Cummings—a “first-class” photographic and historical exhibition of Newark—but Roth himself was the mastermind of it all, overseeing every detail and even providing a rather immodest but not inaccurate title: “The Roth Explosion.”
He insisted on a quick flight aboard the Concorde because of his bad back, and his main companion and moral support, Julia Golier, remembered the rock-star greeting he received from a “gaggle of girls” in Aix (“FEEL-up ROTH . . . FEEL-up ROTH”), where the lampposts were festooned with enormous red banners bearing his likeness. “Now I know what it’s like to be Chairman Mao,” he said to the opening night audience. Roth’s main duty was to preside over master classes about his work. While capacity crowds watched and listened, a portly gray-haired woman sat onstage taking notes for a few minutes at a time, then translating at lucid length whatever a panel of fifteen graduate students had said to Roth and vice versa. Roth would later describe his interlocutors as “young men and women educated to a crisp in the great French fryer of Continental literary education, with its bubbling Derridian rhetoric and dubious wordplay.” Not unlike Norman Podhoretz, they’d concluded Roth was on the side of “tradition” because Levov (meaning “Love”? Or “Lion” for Lev?) was a glove maker and gloves equaled tradition—etc. Roth spoke as carefully as he listened, with a kind of modest detachment toward his own work, as if he were just another (very) perceptive reader; decorously he suggested they think less about symbolic niceties and more about “the costs of a revolutionary period in American life . . . the inability to explain random events and catastrophes in a good man’s life.”
AFTER THE ORDEAL of I Married a Communist, Roth expected even worse gossip mongering to taint the publication of The Human Stain. He’d been tempted to title his novel Spooks, but was dissuaded, he said, by the prospect of being reviewed in the Sunday New York Times by the Reverend Al Sharpton. “What’s the most stupid possible reaction?” he wondered in his notes. “A big picture of Anatole Broyard in the NY Times ‘Arts’ section, next to a picture of PR. Roth steals AB’s biography. That’s the scoop on this book. He can never make anything up. Why did he want to put Anatole down? . . . Because Anatole gave him bad reviews. Roth is settling a score with Anatole.” By then the former Times critic (who’d died in 1990) had become best known as a black man who’d ruthlessly cut ties with his family and “passed” as a white man with a white family in Connecticut. “I always suspected [him] of being a macaroon (one-eighth Jewish),” Roth wrote Updike, remembering his first meeting with Broyard on an Amagansett beach in 1959; in those days Broyard was considered a promising fiction writer, and Roth had admired an early story of his, “What the Cystoscope Said”; in hindsight, though, he decided Broyard’s real talent had been “for elaborate mischief and deception.” And cocksmanship: after Broyard had derided Portnoy, in The New Republic, as the kind of thing one hears “in midtown bars,” Roth affected to concede that it was “probably true. . . . I guess one of the differences between [Broyard] and myself is that after all those nights in those great midtown bars I went home and wrote it down, while he, alas, went off to fuck another girl.”
Publication of The Human Stain was heralded by a feature article—“Philip Roth Blows Up”—in New York, which respectfully proclaimed that “the unthinkable has occurred: Portnoy is a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize.” Roth had refused to comment for the piece because he was “still irk[ed]” by the magazine’s 1996 cover story, captioned “A Hell of a Marriage,” but Harold Bloom and Bellow gladly attested to the greatness of his work in recent years. “It’s almost a Shakespearean outburst of creativity,” said Bloom, while Bellow professed an all but speechless awe: “I wish I understood it. I’m very impressed.” Given the “very optimistic” first printing of 100,000, “the normally press-shy Roth” had agreed to cooperate with friendlier outlets, submitting to a long New Yorker profile and even the odd TV appearance.
As for coverage in the Times, it might have been worse: sure enough Broyard was invoked in both the daily and Sunday reviews, but no one accused Roth of settling scores. “The premise seems to have been inspired by the life story of Anatole Broyard,” Kakutani wrote, adding that the basic story was a familiar one to Roth’s readers: “Indeed, it closely parallels the story of Nathan Zuckerman, himself another dutiful, middle-class boy from New Jersey who rebelled against his family and found himself exiled, ‘unbound’ as it were, from his roots.” Lorrie Moore, in the Sunday Book Review, made the debatable point that Roth (“usually fond of both sides of an argument”) was content merely to ridicule the political correctness of a place like Athena College, “where prejudice may be trickily institutional and atmospheric, causing events like the ‘spooks’ utterance to be seized hold of and overinterpreted”; she concluded nonetheless that the novel was an “often very beautiful book.”
Roth was warned away from reading a review in The New Republic, by James Wood, who found Silk’s secret a little too easy and sentimentalizing, wishing instead Roth had let Silk be, in fact, a bigoted old Jew, or even a secret but self-hating black man: “Imagine the novelistic task of showing that an unpleasant old racist . . . had become the victim of political correctness, and was a rule-defying American individualist. Bigotry as the purest American individualism! That would be a novel to savor.” As it was, said Wood, Roth had already written such a novel—Sabbath’s Theater—“the story of an unsavory nihilist (sexist, racist, brutalist) whose battle-cry is ‘fuck the laudable ideologies.’ ”
In a more muted way, the same battle cry may be heard in The Human Stain, given that ideologies of whatever sort tend to obscure the truth about human nature embodied by the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. “I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner,” Zuckerman reflects, “draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.” In the first two novels of his American Trilogy, Roth had examined the “fantasy of purity” as imposed by the antiwar left and the anti-Communist right, and in his final book the puritanism is general—from the “Talibanism” of campus political correctness to the larger cynicism of the right’s crusade to scapegoat Clinton and force his party out of power. Aptly, the brutalized Faunia speaks the eponymous phrase, “the human stain,” while considering her beloved crow, Prince, violently rejected by other crows because he was raised by humans—by people like us, says Faunia, speaking “without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness. . . . Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience.”
Faunia loves her fellow misfit, Prince, a “crow that doesn’t know how to be a crow”—a predicament shared by her human lover, a black man passing as a Jew. “Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age,” writes the sanctimonious department chair, Delphine Roux, who’d earlier accused Silk of racism and whose Delphic certainty will lead to rue (as the French might say). “Because we don’t know, do we? . . . What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux.” The irony of mistaken judgment applies to Silk and his accuser equally: the latter begins as a kind of cartoon academic, an easy satirical target, but later is beautifully humanized into her own brand of lonely misfit—“isolated, estranged, confused about everything essential to a life, in a desperate state of bewildered longing and surrounded on all sides by admonishing forces defining her as the enemy.” Among the things Roux fails to understand is that she herself is a bit of a racist, which suggests that her obsessive hostility toward Silk is rather the opposite of what it seems. Hence the bleak epiphany that follows her attempt to write a “subtly coded” personal ad, conveying a taste for swarthiness but not for negritude per se: “Mature man with backbone. Independent. Witty. Lively. . . . Mediterranean complexion. Green eyes preferred. . . . Graying hair acceptable, even desirable.” Coleman, in short, who incenses her (in part) by seeming to prefer an “illiterate woman” to an alluring cosmopolitan scholar such as herself.
The title of Roth’s novel suggests another examination of the repellent, just as Coleman’s flight from his race is a reworking of Roth’s great theme going back to Goodbye, Columbus: the I against the They, a longing to live on one’s own terms, free of the smothering community, amid, too, an abiding wistfulness to belong—to be a good son, a mensch, a libertine, a nihilist—all of the above. “She was marveling at discovering being one person in secret and another everywhere else, enjoying the kick of having a multiple self who behaves various ways in numerous lives and of possessing an impressively lavish endowment of self-abandonment”: so Roth wrote of his lover Inga, and so he might have written about himself—or about Coleman Silk, whose dexterity in slipping among his multiple selves is foreshadowed by his career as a counterpunching boxer, “Silky Silk.” As a boxer he makes his first foray into passing as white, but not until his arrival at Howard University does he fully grasp what awaits him, as a black man, in the wider world—at Woolworth’s, for instance, where he and his roommate try to get a hot dog: “he was called a nigger. His first time. And they wouldn’t give him the hot dog.” Thus Silk decides to emancipate himself from both the “big they” and the “little they”: “You can’t let the big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you. . . . The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?”
In disgrace, at age seventy-one, Silk leaves his life behind for a second time—free to indulge the “Aschenbachian madness” of his affair with Faunia. Given his own Aschenbachian sprees of late, Roth had been all the more eager to bury himself in work on The Human Stain: “Nobody to disturb me,” he told Finkielkraut. “Girls—when I need girls, they come! You see, Alain, when you get older you become smart.” A reminder that he still had a thing or two to learn, perhaps, was Sylvia, who left prison in July 2000 and promptly got back in touch. “[Sylvia]—record,” Roth jotted in his notes; afterward he typed a description of their brief exchange (“Call from [Sylvia] after getting out of Niantic prison,” he wrote with a black Flair pen at top):
[Sylvia:] “Thank you. . . . For your undying whatever.” Voice no longer confident. Empty. Lacking its cocky timbre. “You seem to have a way of paying for my insurance. It’s a wonderful thing.” . . .
“Well, [Sylvia], I wish you luck. Do you ever have any?”
Silence.
“I want to see you,” she says.
“That’s impossible. I’m afraid it’s out of the question. Because I’m seriously involved with someone else [not true]. And that’s the deal. And she’s as possessive as I am, and that just cannot be. I’m sorry but that’s the way it is.”
Silence.
“Okay?”
“That’s it?” she says.
“That’s it . . . Okay . . . Good luck . . . Good luck, [Sylvia].”
Three months later, she called again. “Who’s Faunia Farley?” she demanded (“not entirely coherent,” Roth remembered). “A character in a novel,” he replied. “You stole my life!” she said, threatening to sue him for “plagiarism.” Indeed, she went so far as to phone his Connecticut lawyer, Perley Grimes, to whom she repeated the plagiarism charge and gave the name and number of a lawyer in Litchfield she’d allegedly hired. Neither Roth nor Grimes heard from her again, however; fourteen months later, while running errands in Cornwall Bridge, Roth heard that she’d been found dead in a Torrington motel room. “I foresaw her end,” he told Miller, referring to Faunia’s violent death at the hands of her crazed former husband. Roth, wondering whether foul play had been involved in Sylvia’s case, “tried and failed” to get an autopsy report.
According to her brother, she’d died of heroin and alcohol poisoning (though she’d always insisted she never took illegal drugs). At some point she’d mentioned that her “mysterious benefactor” was a famous writer, and eventually her family figured out it was Roth. Sylvia’s mother read The Human Stain and recognized her daughter in Faunia, though the details of her life were largely altered or mistaken: “It’s supported by a story that itself is fiction,” said her brother. “[Sylvia] created her own little world.”
Her death coincided with perhaps the peak of Roth’s literary reputation. In Newsweek, David Gates applauded his “magnificent Indian summer” as the author of the American Trilogy, and The Human Stain won a trifecta of major international awards: the PEN/Faulkner, the W. H. Smith in Britain, and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign book in France, where the novel sold an astounding 300,000 copies—six times greater than its sale in the States.