CHAPTER
Forty-Three
IN 1960, WHEN TOM AND JACQUIE ROGERS CELEBRATED Thanksgiving with the Roths in Iowa City, Jacquie was five months pregnant with their second daughter, Susan. Twelve years later, the Rogerses stopped in Warren on their way to a summer rental in Maine, and, amid hilarious rounds of croquet and darts, little Susie developed a crush on Barbara Sproul; she liked Roth, too, and would always be an ideal audience for his shtick. “Now I see why people have children,” Roth said to Tom, whose daughter was tittering away. “So somebody will laugh at their jokes.”
The years passed. In 1991, while Susan was finishing graduate work at Columbia, she and her mother visited Roth and Bloom at their apartment on West Seventy-seventh; Susan remembered Roth as “kind of wired” and “flirtatious” on that occasion—quite forward about pressing the younger woman to meet him for dinner and so forth—even though Susan was “very much identifying” as a lesbian at the time. Later, while working as an editor for the Journal of the History of Sexuality at Bard, she paid the odd visit to Roth in Connecticut for a chaste swim and dinner, then moved to Tucson with her girlfriend in 1996.
When Rogers revisited her old family friend in Connecticut during the fall of 2001, both were in a bad way. Rogers had left Tucson after her girlfriend decided to get a sex-change operation and was now in the midst of a tough, underpaid, and romantically complicated year of teaching at Bard. As for Roth, he was beset by the three great calamities that—in unison—invariably led to despair: “back pain, love trouble, and an issue with writing,” as Golier tabulated them. He’d been alone for most of that summer, wracked with pain, and depressed over the lost Margot and his failure to get another novel going since finishing The Dying Animal. During Rogers’s visit, he slipped on the step leading to his studio porch and gashed his hand; Rogers ran back to the house for first-aid things and calmly bandaged him up. (“In his mind it was a turning point,” she laughed. “He saw me as the one who could take care.”) Roth was feeling better the next time she visited, and they became lovers after a jolly dinner at the Hopkins Inn.
“Why was I wasting my time all those years with straight women?” he said to her, while seeming to take a not-so-sneaking pride in having “converted” her to heterosexuality (in fact she’d always considered herself more or less bisexual). Mainly they had fun together, and she was disposed as ever to laugh at his jokes. “You are the easiest white girl to laugh that I ever knew,” he’d say, paraphrasing Huck Finn. One winter night they sat in front of a fire collaborating on a map of Arizona that reflected Rogers’s bittersweet memories of the place: the town of Far Right was at the head of Death Penalty River, amid the Broken Tits Wilderness Area, while Far from the Madding Crowd was well west of a cluster of villages labeled Madding Crowd, etc. Another thing about the strong-willed, athletic Rogers that appealed to Roth was—as he saw it—her waifish quality withal, which may explain why he was apt to assume a kind of loco parentis role. At Bard, Rogers had been hired through the efforts of an older woman, a dean, who’d fallen in love with her and wouldn’t go quietly when Rogers tried to end the affair. As Roth recorded in one of several letters he mailed to himself as a record of possible harassment from the dean (this at the advice of his lawyer Russell Brooks), Rogers was visiting him in Warren when an “official-sounding” woman called his unlisted number and identified herself as “the Gallup poll calling for Susan Rogers”; afterward Rogers pointed out that the lovelorn dean had Roth’s number on file because he’d taught at Bard. Privately (and correctly) Rogers doubted the woman was capable of any real malevolence, though she worried in earnest (correctly again) that the whole episode would wind up in Roth’s fiction.
Above all, Roth enjoyed playing Pygmalion to the much younger woman—a Pygmalion with deep pockets, since she received a pauper’s wage at Bard and was barely able to cover her bills. Roth’s first gift of $10,000 was accompanied by a nice note (“There’s no need to mention this”), and was soon followed by another check for $100,000 and a two-year-old Volvo that Roth picked out himself. A little less disinterested was his desire to help her dress better, as he thought she looked too butch to be seen on the arm of America’s greatest living writer. It began with a snazzy jacket Roth spotted in the window of Derwin’s, in Litchfield,* and evolved into shopping sprees at the chic Upper East Side consignment shops favored by Judith Thurman, who went around “whipping things off the rack” and handing them to Rogers in the dressing room. “It was fun,” said Rogers. “There’s a little too much on his side that he’d found a country bumpkin and he was polishing me up. That was a little offensive.” “And her hair was awful,” said Roth. “It was dyke hair. . . . I say, ‘You could be a very pretty girl if you do something with your hair.’ Why shouldn’t I tell them that? They can say no. I don’t twist their arm. So I pay a hundred bucks for her haircut. I’m rich, what do I care?” Actually it was $125, and never mind the ten or so trade magazines Roth bought at a kiosk near the City Athletic Club; after finding a style they both liked, Roth again consulted Thurman, who sent them to a posh stylist on East Fifty-ninth. “Philip went along the first time,” Rogers recalled, “and ogled all the young beautiful women.”
Indeed, if Roth had any qualm about dating Rogers, it had more to do with her age than her tonsorial/sartorial shortcomings—that is to say, she was too old. Reminded of their hilarious 2003 encounter with Claire Bloom on Columbus Avenue, Rogers consulted her journal (it happened on April 28) and read the following entry: “When we get back to the apartment, he said, ‘Too bad [Margot] wasn’t with me.’ And I ask, ‘Why? Because she’s so beautiful?’ ‘No . . . because she’s young. How old do you think you look?’ ” After Rogers returned that night to her room at the Athletic Club (Roth preferred sleeping alone and didn’t have a spare bedroom in those days), he called to apologize. Again, the journal: “ ‘I said a terrible thing to you. I meant that I wanted her to see me with someone really young.’ ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘And I am used to it.’ ”
“I COULDN’T BEAR any longer writing about dickless Zuckerman,” Roth remarked of his decision to resurrect Kepesh after he’d finished his American Trilogy. He considered the Kepesh novels—The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977), and The Dying Animal (2001)—as a trilogy of sorts, too. “I wanted to portray a single man living three different erotic lives,” he wrote Josyane Savigneau, “one grotesque, one conventional, and the last free, unencumbered, singularly pleasure-loving—Kepesh as an erotic hedonist, an aesthetician of fucking. Grotesque, conventional, hedonistic—I could as well be describing the erotic life of one man, one representative man over a lifetime, could I not?” Aboard the Concorde to Aix, Roth had reread one of his favorite novellas, Camus’s The Fall, and was thus inspired to write The Dying Animal in the form of a confessional monologue addressed to a nameless interlocutor. As for the protagonist’s main aesthetic concern—Consuela’s gorgeously ample breasts—Roth was thinking of “a Dutch friend,” he said, who’d also fixated on that feature of a much younger girlfriend; long after they’d parted, she came back to see him and break the news of her breast cancer.
Kakutani, for one, took a dim view of Roth’s “flimsy and synthetic” novella—a particular disappointment to her after the lofty achievement of the American Trilogy, whose larger social canvas Roth had tried to insinuate, she thought, via Kepesh’s “wholly unpersuasive” tendency to frame his life in terms of the transformative sixties. As an apologia for heedless libertinism, the book was bound to rub a lot of people the wrong way: A. O. Scott, in the Sunday Times, found the narrator a “garden-variety solipsist” with “a knack for pre-emptive self-forgiveness,” whereas The Economist dismissed him simply as “a crashing bore.” But the novella had formidable defenders. “What is rather unusual about it,” David Lodge wrote in The New York Review of Books, “is the way it challenges the reader at every point to define and defend his own ethical position toward the issues raised by the story. It is a small, disturbing masterpiece.” Michael Dirda agreed, in The Washington Post, ranking it among other classic “récits” of European fiction such as The Fall and Gide’s The Immoralist: “Is Philip Roth now our finest living novelist?”
Certainly there was nothing contrived about the momentous view Kepesh—and his creator—takes of the sixties. Back in 1974, reflecting on the origins of Portnoy, Roth wrote: “I sometimes think of my generation of men as the first wave of determined D-day invaders, over whose bloody, wounded carcasses the flower children subsequently stepped ashore to advance triumphantly toward that libidinous Paris we had dreamed of liberating as we inched inland on our bellies, firing into the dark.” Philip Larkin had lamented that the sexual revolution began “rather late” for him to benefit—also late for Roth, but not too late. In 1963 he fled his ghastly marriage for good, and endeavored to make up for lost time as a free man in Manhattan. His brother, Sandy, likewise awoke to the reality that he was trapped in a marriage to the sweet, decent, but sexually undesirable Trudy, while all sorts of unattached women were suddenly available to him (“he was driven mad by it,” said Philip, who put some of his brother’s madness into Portnoy). As Kepesh points out, his generation of men had spent their formative years as sexual thieves, and once they jumped the marital fence, they tried never to look back at the people they’d left behind. Roth cut loose a doting stepdaughter, Helen, while Kepesh accepts that his middle-aged son hates him. “The long white pageboy of important hair,” Kenny describes his “pathetic old fool” of a father, “the turkey wattle half hidden behind the fancy foulard—when will you begin to rouge your cheeks, Herr von Aschenbach?”
Roth, of course, understood that sexual freedom is, as Kepesh observes, “a very risky game. A man wouldn’t have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn’t venture off to get fucked. It’s sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.” Sex may lead to disorder in the form of, say, an unstable alcoholic paramour, or else—as Roth experienced with Margot and certain of her successors—to the ultimate disorder, love, and its concomitant loss of freedom and well-being. “I still can’t say that anything I ever did sexually excited Consuela about me,” Kepesh admits. “Which was largely why, from the evening we first went to bed eight years back, I never had a moment’s peace, why, whether she realized it or not, I was all weakness and worry from then on.” However: as a man gets older, and potency wanes, the sacrifice of sexual freedom would seem a less crucial matter. With that in mind, it’s hard to imagine many readers biting their nails when Kepesh’s hitherto silent auditor speaks up, portentously, on the last page of the book. “Think about it,” s/he says, as Kepesh is tempted to go comfort Consuela in the hospital. “Think. Because if you go, you’re finished.” The end. Will Kepesh forfeit his long career as a roué for the homelier joys of monogamy? But never mind: one can enjoy The Dying Animal as a stylishly minor tour de force, without necessarily being impressed by every one of its moral perplexities. As the critic Lee Siegel put it, “It is like using exquisite Carrera marble to expertly carve the sculpture of a dildo.”
ROTH’S NEXT BOOK, Shop Talk, published four months later, mostly consisted of the interviews he’d conducted over the years with various European colleagues, including a number of Jewish writers whose sufferings under Nazism had led Roth to reflect on his very different life in America—survivors of the camps such as Levi, Appelfeld, and Klíma, writers “bound together by their post-Kafka sensibility,” as Richard Bernstein wrote in one of the book’s very few reviews. “They are the ones who lived the reality that was Kafka’s nightmare—his conviction, as Mr. Klíma puts it, that ‘a dependable world of dignity and justice is what is absurdly fantastic.’ ” A year later, during a Partisan Review symposium at Boston University (“Our Country, Our Culture”), Cynthia Ozick cited the neglect of Roth’s most recent book as a grim bellwether: “A writer of Roth’s stature—one of the shapers of the novel in our time—engaging with ten of the significant literary figures of the twentieth century! Fifty years ago, we can be sure, this would have been taken as an Event, as a cultural marker, as an occasion for heating up New York’s literary stewpots as much as, or even more than, Franzen’s explosive—and ephemeral—wistfulness” (a reference to the novelist Jonathan Franzen’s controversial ambivalence toward Oprah’s Book Club). Aside from Bernstein’s review in the daily Times—even Kakutani excused herself this time—the only major notice was a “Books in Brief” mention in the Sunday Times, which described Roth qua interviewer as “a cross between Lionel Trilling and Barbara Walters.”
Perhaps one reason for the general indifference was poor timing, given that Shop Talk was published the day after 9/11—the imminence of which had been eerily suggested in The Dying Animal: “Brilliance flaring across the time zones,” Roth wrote of the millennial New Year’s Eve celebration, “and none ignited by bin Laden.” On the morning the Twin Towers fell, Roth had been at the City Athletic Club in Midtown; for a few minutes he watched the terrible footage with other members in the TV lounge, then went outside and gazed at the river of pedestrians milling uptown along Sixth Avenue. As on November 22, 1963, Roth spent the rest of the day walking around the city, “seeing what was to be seen” and commiserating with other New Yorkers. Rather than return to Connecticut the next day, as planned, Roth decided to stay put for the rest of the month, and expressed solidarity with a big American flag hung in his south-facing window; meanwhile he became “furious with people like Susan Sontag who were blaming America and blaming the victims—people who said the deed was a result of American policy in the Middle East rather than the result of the way these people were brought up and abused by their own countries.”
His dismay was exacerbated by killing back pain, now accompanied by numbness in his right leg that made walking difficult and writing all but impossible—he had to stop every twenty minutes or so and lie on a floor mat. Because an unsympathetic colonel had called him a malingerer in 1956, Roth had let almost half a century pass before he sought serious treatment for his back. “I’m surprised you’re still ambulatory,” said a spinal surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital, surveying the awful results of Roth’s MRI: in addition to drastic degeneration at several levels of his lumbar spine, Roth learned for the first time that he’d been a lifelong sufferer of scoliosis. Surgery followed on March 26, 2002, but had to be stopped after the repair of a single disc (L5-S1) when Roth’s blood pressure plummeted (caused, ironically, by the beta-blocker he’d taken to stabilize his heart pre-surgery).
Because of kidney damage caused by his previously occluded renal artery, Roth had low tolerance for certain drugs in high doses—including morphine, as he learned during a recovery that proved horrific for patient and caretakers alike. Roth, hallucinating, took a swing at a nurse who was trying to help him off the bed, and yelled terrible things at Susan Rogers, who’d canceled an entire week of her Bard classes prior to spring break so she could look after him (“nobody in my life knows that I’m involved [with Roth],” she remembered, “so this takes a lot of smoke and mirrors”). Finally she was so distraught that she phoned Roth’s usual minder, Ross Miller, who was himself sick at the time: an old hand by then, Miller patiently explained that Roth was coming off painkillers and would be himself again, more or less, in five or six hours. Indeed, Roth was well enough to take a short walk with Rogers a few days later, but was irritated when she abruptly abandoned him to visit her hospitalized father (pancreatitis) and tend her ailing mother (shingles), which is how she spent her spring break.
IN DECEMBER 2000, Roth had been reading an advance copy of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s autobiography when he came across a “single, almost expendable sentence” about how the far-right wing of the Republican party had wanted to run Charles Lindbergh as their candidate for president in 1940. “What if they had?” Roth wrote in the margin. Over lunch he grilled Schlesinger about Lindbergh and the far right, as he’d begun to consider writing a novel with some such title as Our Life under Lindbergh—the first-person plural because he’d decided to feature his own family: “So on the one hand,” he said, “the book is far out, in that it imagined Lindbergh as the president of the U.S., and on the other it’s far in, to imagine my family as being victims.”
“The book I’m working on gets bigger and bigger,” he wrote his Gallimard editor on November 3, 2002. “Good! What else is there to do?” Roth absorbed himself in research about the book’s various historical personages, especially Lindbergh himself, whom he was careful not “to caricature or revile” in the course of evoking his alternative presidency. As a figurehead of the noninterventionist America First Committee, Lindbergh had made his anti-Semitism explicit in a speech to an AFC rally on September 11, 1941, “Who Are the War Agitators?,” which blamed “the Jewish race” for pushing the country toward war “for reasons which are not American.” His good friend Henry Ford had encouraged such views, until even the AFC publicly disavowed Ford to avoid the taint of a more rabid anti-Semitism: “I know who caused the war,” Ford had said in 1915: “German-Jewish bankers . . . a power that has no country and that can order the young men of all countries out to death.” Such scapegoating was zealously promoted by “our nation’s anti-Semitic propaganda minister”—as Roth called him—the radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin: “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted,” Coughlin remarked of the Kristallnacht pogrom, and, five weeks later, on December 18, 1938, he incited followers in New York to march in protest against a law that would have enabled more European Jews to seek asylum in the United States. “Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!” the marchers chanted.
“Orwell imagined a huge change in the future with horrendous consequences for everyone,” Roth wrote of his approach in The Plot Against America; “I tried to imagine a small change in the past with horrendous consequences for a relative few.” Among the book’s more persuasive elements are the insidious measures Lindbergh takes to target Jews—via the vaguely (“but only vaguely”) hostile “Just Folks” program, for instance, which relocates Jews to predominantly gentile communities. Roth explained that he’d never previously written about his family as they really were—“good, hard-working, responsible”—because it was “boring. . . . What I discovered inadvertently was that if you put pressure on these decent people, then you’ve got a story.” Roth was especially eager to rectify the public perception of his mother as Sophie Portnoy, and finally show her as the kind, competent person she was; however, his latest novel also required at least one defector in the family, and so Sandy became a rather unpleasant (and un-Sandy-like) Lindberghite.
The novel is dedicated to Susan Rogers (“To S. F. R.”), whom Roth credited with the creation of the novel’s “most tragic figure,” Seldon Wishnow: “that nice, lonely little kid in your class whom you run away from when you’re yourself a kid,” said Roth, “because he demands to be befriended by you in ways that another child cannot stand.” Whenever he got stuck writing about Seldon—whose family lives downstairs from the Roths, and whose parents are both dead by the end of the book—he would burst in on Rogers and insist she role-play Seldon with him in a given scene, thus: “Philip said something like ‘I don’t have to be nice to you just because your father hanged himself,’ ” Rogers remembered. “Something incredibly mean. And I burst into tears”—in part because her own father was sick with colon cancer at the time—“but I’m still Seldon in tears.” Roth thought his companion’s impression of the woebegone boy was “right on the money,” whereas Rogers identified deeply with Seldon’s “lostness,” at least in terms of her relationship with Roth. “His view of who I am, even now,” she said in 2014, “and who I actually am, has . . . There’s not a one-for-one there.” She laughed, bleakly. “The extent to which our relationship was lopsided, and seeing that pattern again and again in his relationships. . . . This wasn’t equal in any way.”
THE PEREMPTORY SIDE of Roth’s nature seemed to wax along with his eminence. “It’s impossible to know Philip and know his history without knowing all the beached fish,” said Kazin’s widow, Judith Dunford, who’d washed up on that beach herself for a time, as had Judith Thurman (“I love him anyway”), who noted that Roth was decidedly prone to letting “old griefs and resentments fester,” and hence his circle of friends tended to wane somewhat in these years. For almost five decades, Roth and Dick Stern—“Rawt” and “Shtoin,” as they called each other—had engaged in high-minded and often hilarious discussions about literature, their own and the world’s. That Stern seemed not to mind the chasm separating their respective reputations was due in part to his own good nature, as well as a firm awareness that Roth deeply respected Stern’s work and was nearly as mystified by Stern’s obscurity as was Stern himself. Over the years Roth’s main engagement with the American Academy of Arts and Letters was to hector that august body to recognize Stern, who finally received the Academy’s Medal of Merit for the Novel in 1985, twelve years after Roth first proposed him for it. His efforts to get Stern elected as an actual member were another matter. Not even the mighty triumvirate of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth—Hart, Schaff-ner, and Marx, after all—could do the trick in 1979. “Poor Dick,” Roth wrote Bellow a decade later, suggesting they try again. “They really won’t let him get a foot in the door.”
“Things mount up in a friendship,” said Stern, explaining his complicated falling-out with Roth in 2000. First there was Roth’s thrashing of Pacific Tremors, Stern’s final novel, which Stern suspected had bothered Roth for “extra-literary” reasons—such as its emphasis on the joys of grandfatherhood, which bristled against the whole weltanschauung of Roth’s own recent novel, The Dying Animal (wherein, as Stern put it, “the only thing that counts is fucking”). Replying to Roth’s sober but caustic critique of Pacific Tremors, Stern seemed to concede a few points with his usual equanimity, while getting in a few jujitsu jabs of his own: “the prose is not in the same league with the prose I wrote for most of my writing life (which was, even so, barer, quicker, less intense and striking than yours, and errs in those directions as yours perhaps errs in the direction of excess, beating a subject to death or boredom, and sometimes miscalculating the import of certain events and revelations).” Of course, the friendship would have easily survived such an exchange, but things had indeed mounted up over the years and Stern was not quite done getting his own back. Reviewing Bellow: A Biography in the December 11 issue of The Nation, Stern wrote that he’d assured his old friend Bellow—while still in the midst of reading Atlas’s book—that he had little to worry about; then Stern read the latter part of Atlas and revised his position somewhat: “I wrote Bellow telling him that although what counted—the portrait of a remarkable person becoming over decades even more remarkable—was intact, I believe that it was deformed by Atlas’s querulous anger, if not by sanctimonious contempt, and that he and Janis would do well not to read it.”† That said, Stern’s main verdict was that Atlas had written a “fascinating and sometimes brilliant book.”
Stern’s mostly glowing notice of the Atlas book was pushing his luck, Rothwise, and yet all might have been well, still, if not for the following passage: “I’ve thought and talked about Bellow—and now this biography—with a few friends who know him,” Stern wrote.
One friend, a first-rate novelist, thinks Atlas not only misunderstands Bellow’s radical independence but resents it. So he sees a politically correct Atlas piling up criticism along familiar—to Bellow critics—misogynist, conservative and racial lines. He thinks that Atlas is shocked by Bellow’s anarchic “cocksmanship,” and when I suggested that Bellow had a grand streak of bad boy, if not outlaw, in him, he found a different way to express his own view: “He’s a transgressive monkey. And a great con man.” He makes Bellow into a version of a favorite character of his own fiction, a brilliantly anarchic, half-crazed sexual adventurer.
Considering that blatant giveaway at the end, Roth’s response was measured, really, albeit the more withering for that. He pointed out that Stern had mischaracterized his remarks in various ways, some more offensive than others. Roth hadn’t, for example, said that Atlas was “shocked by Bellow’s ‘cocksmanship,’ ” but that Atlas was “envious of Saul’s erotic freedom.” He went on:
It was, of course, Atlas and not Bellow . . . who I called “a little monkey” and “a con man.” There’s a certain mischief, is there not, in your getting that wrong? I’d like to chalk it up to a weak memory or to inattentiveness on your part, but you have made it difficult for me to be charitable by going out of your way to be sure that the identity of the “first-rate novelist” and “friend” disparaging Bellow isn’t too hard for a literate reader of The Nation to divine.
Stern later admitted to his wife, Alane Rollings, that his remarks in the Atlas review had indeed been mischievous, though at the time he seemed less than repentant. “Incidentally,” he replied to Roth, “my ‘tootsie’ [Rollings], as you like to call her, wondered if I couldn’t have disguised the ‘friend’ better by calling him ‘a second-rate novelist’?”‡ Whereupon Roth didn’t speak to him again for three years or more—a time when Stern cultivated a friendship with Sandy, in Chicago (“partly because he reminds me of Philip”); as for Roth himself, his ultimate view of the rift was magnanimous: “It was a stupid argument and I shouldn’t have taken part in it.”
While still in the outer darkness, Stern had written Jack Miles an email in which he reflected that their mutual friend had “a need to separate from those he’s ‘devoured’ ”—i.e., used for his fiction in some more or less derogatory way—and Stern was relieved, at least, that such hadn’t been his own fate (yet). Roth’s old boon companion Alan Lelchuk was another matter, though Roth waited until things had cooled between them before lowering the boom. Critics had mostly savaged Lelchuk’s first novel, American Mischief, and Roth, its midwife, was little other than consoling; he didn’t mince words, however, when it came to the flaws he perceived as endemic to Lelchuk’s work: “That superiority again,” he wrote of a subsequent manuscript: “second-rate academics, so-called book reviews, pompous professors. All too easy. . . . Seriously, you had better watch out for the condescension in your heroes.” And Roth’s next critique betrayed an even more fraying patience: “Alan: NOTHING HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK, at least not in the first 100 pages. . . . And the sex is really the worst of all. It just means nothing, because NOTHING IS EVER AT STAKE FOR ANYONE. It’s just cocks and cunts, boy: Porn!”
“I wrote about [Lelchuk] in a book,” Roth admitted in 2012, “which he may or may not have read.” Actually he wrote about Lelchuk in two books, and there was little confusion on his part as to whether Lelchuk had read them. “Correct me if I am wrong,” Lelchuk had written him, after encountering the randy Baumgarten in The Professor of Desire, “but didn’t we make an agreement or pact, some seven or eight years ago in a Yaddo study, that we would not write about each other’s lives in fiction?” Kepesh, in the novel, considers Baumgarten “a parodied projection of myself,” which was akin to how critics had come to view Lelchuk in relation to his mentor: “Lelchuk’s enchantment with Philip Roth’s aims and style is by now almost complete,” wrote a Kirkus reviewer of Lelchuk’s Shrinking, published the year after Roth’s Professor. In the meantime Roth had hastened to reassure his friend about the composite Baumgarten: “There is no other colleague whose well-being and reputation I have ever concerned myself with more, and I don’t think you have anything to worry about now, or ever, from me.” The first part of this formulation was true enough, whereas the second was belied, six years later, by the Lelchukian Ivan Felt in The Anatomy Lesson—a “brash, presumptuous, overconfident, and ostentatious egotist,” whose first novel “was as raw as Felt but, alas, only half as overbearing; Zuckerman’s guess was that if he could get all that overbearing nature coursing through the prose, abandon his halfhearted objectivity and strange lingering respect for the great moral theme, Ivan Felt might yet become a real artist in the demonic, spiteful Céline line.”
Over the next twenty years the friendship rotted and dropped off the vine. Then one day Betsy Pochoda phoned Roth about a vague rumor she’d heard that Lelchuk was writing a scabrous book about Roth’s literary and sexual predations (“Everyone knows Philip wants to write books and screw women,” said Pochoda; “more power to him”); the all-but-forgotten Lelchuk, it seemed, was even then shopping around for a publisher. “He doesn’t need a publisher,” Roth hooted, “he needs an English teacher.” Roth would always insist he never bothered to read the roman à clef in question, Ziff: A Life? (2003), claiming total indifference—somewhat persuasively, in fact. Though naturally battered by the sustained character assassination of Leaving a Doll’s House, a part of Roth really believed he had no right to object to his appearance in other people’s work. He had an interesting exchange on this point, in 1998, with the German journalist Volker Hage:
HAGE: Have any friends of yours complained on finding themselves in your books?
ROTH: They’re pleased as can be. Usually there’s a line of people out there, saying “Do me, do me, do me next!”
HAGE: And how do you feel about being portrayed in a novel or in memoirs?
ROTH: Oh, I’m magnanimous.
Sometimes he was. Roth was portrayed unsympathetically in an early draft of Alison Lurie’s 1969 novel about Yaddo (“Illyria”), Real People, and professed disappointment when she dropped the Roth-like character, Daniel Reck: “I couldn’t care less about being maligned in literary works,” he wrote her; “if I did I wouldn’t have written my own work. . . . The trouble was that the man, as you had conceived him, was understood by the reader before he was even presented. . . . I am not just a shit (when I am being one) but an interesting and intelligent shit. Reck was dull and stupid, a malicious man without wit or intelligence.” They remained friends.
When Lelchuk worriedly offered to let him see the Ziff manuscript, Roth replied with suave benignity that Lelchuk should just send a bound galley when the time came. One can only guess what he would have made of it. “One of the two or three most famous (serious) writers in the country,” Lelchuk described Arthur Ziff, ex-“best pal” of the washed-up narrator, Levitan, whom Ziff mercilessly lampoons in his work (“a cartoonish distortion”) but who now stands to get revenge as Ziff’s biographer. Hardly a work of demonic brilliance à la Céline, Ziff nonetheless contains the odd aperçu: “Arthur Ziff was smart, shrewd, self-protective, literary, and very clever. He also was vulnerable, blind, narcissistic, missing in certain emotions, a man of rich paradoxes.” Ziff struck the critic Mark Shechner as a kind of latter-day Henry IV, “with Ziff/Roth as Prince Hal and Levitan/Lelchuk as Falstaff. One moment they are prowling the streets of Cambridge together, hot young men on the make, and the next Prince Hal has grown up to be King Henry and is no longer returning Falstaff’s calls.”
“As for the Gentileness of you and Joel [Conarroe] as Philipian survivors, that’s intriguing,” the estranged Stern wrote Miles in 2001. “I think I prefer your ‘diplomacy,’ your loyalty, your intelligence and devotion as criteria for executorship.” Conarroe, in particular, had been a steadfast and essentially subordinate friend to Roth. During the seventies he’d acted as a good-natured procurer for Roth’s Penn classes, then gladly promoted the work of both Roth and Roth’s friends (“What’s my next assignment, boss?” he wrote Roth, after making sure a friend’s book was nominated for a major literary award in 1986) as a perennial member of prize juries. Conarroe accepted his role with stoic bemusement: “The conversation the other night,” he wrote in an August 2000 diary entry, “—and I felt subtly put down 3 or 4 times—about Lieberman, Romania, Saint Simon’s memoirs—made me feel remarkably superficial, what with my love of newspapers, magazines, tv shows, current books. One becomes an audience in Philip’s blazing presence, occasionally throwing in a word or two but mostly without much presence.”
Conarroe had trod safely for almost four decades—until suddenly, in 2003, his foot slipped on the tightrope between Roth and Roth’s various bêtes noires. One of these was the poet Amiri Baraka, who’d been inducted into the Academy the same year Roth had received his Gold Medal (2001). A year later, Baraka was involved in a controversy over his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” which suggested Israel had known in advance about the 9/11 attacks:
. . . Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Who? Who? Who? . . .
Apoplectic, Roth fired off a note to the Academy secretary: “ ‘Who made the credit cards’ is still my favorite line,” he wrote her. “Which is yours?
Who murdered the English language
Who the worst poet in America
Who, who, who
And who the idiot who nominated this jerk. Please let me know.
As Roth was shortly informed, Baraka had been proposed for membership by Francine du Plessix Gray (“She gets everything right”).
It so happened the theme of “Somebody Blew Up America” was a well-worn aspect of Baraka’s work. As an Anti-Defamation League report pointed out, his 1967 poem “Black People!” had suggested that merchandise in Jewish-owned stores such as Klein’s and Hahne’s could be had with the magic words, “Up against the wall, mother fucker, this is a stick up!” Lest one think this is so much abstract satire, Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones, whose play Dutchman Roth had savaged in a 1964 issue of the New York Review) had been arrested during the 1967 Newark riots for carrying an illegal weapon and inciting to riot.§ “A whole business is going down the drain because of that son of a bitch LeRoi Jones,” says the Swede’s obstreperous father in American Pastoral, “that Peek-A-Boo-Boopy-Do, whatever the hell he calls himself in that goddamn hat.” Later Baraka was careful to make a distinction between Judaism and Zionism (“It is Zionists who control Israel and have the most influence now in the Jewish bourgeoisie”), though, to be sure, he wasn’t advocating the robbery of Zionists per se in “Black People!”
Baraka was appointed Poet Laureate of New Jersey in 2002, a position the legislature proposed to abolish a few months later, in light of the outrage over “Somebody Blew Up America.” Conarroe, as president of PEN America, had co-signed a protest letter written largely at the behest of K. Anthony Appiah, chairman of the PEN Freedom to Write Committee, advising the legislature that they stood to violate the First Amendment: “We are troubled by any controversy that focuses on a few short passages extracted from a much longer piece of literature and fails to acknowledge fully the context of the passages within the work or the context of the work within the traditions and conventions of the art.” When other PEN members proposed to publish the same letter in The New York Review of Books, Conarroe balked; after talking things over with Roth, he explained his misgivings to PEN: “I’m bothered by the phrase ‘a few short passages,’ as if there’s very little here, after all, to object to, and also by the idea of calling the diatribe a piece of ‘literature,’ which it’s not, and to referring to the tradition and conventions of ‘the art,’ as if this unspeakable outburst had anything to do with art. Is ‘Protocols of Zion’ a work of art?” The next day Conarroe conclusively refused to sign a public letter in the New York Review.
Within a week, Roth somehow got word that his friend’s signature had, in fact, been on the original letter to the legislature supporting “a ranting, demagogic, anti-Semitic liar,” as Roth considered Baraka, “and a ridiculously untalented poet to boot”; furious that Conarroe had failed to mention his previous defense “of this cocksucker,” he left a ranting message on Conarroe’s answering machine, followed by a FedEx letter accusing him of deception: “My friends don’t lie to me on serious issues nor do they deliberately withhold information that is vital to understanding their predicament when they ask for my assistance.” “You seem to be angry about a lot of things (and people) these days,” replied Conarroe, whose sweetness did, after all, have a limit. “Did I lie and say I hadn’t signed? Bullshit. I called on an old friend for advice because . . . I thought the letter to be published in NYRB was to be a different letter, one that would newly state PEN’s position, and not the one sent to NJ, and that I would be able to make changes that would reflect my own second thoughts.” Such was Roth’s lingering pique, however, that he had Wylie (or rather an employee in Wylie’s office) return Conarroe’s letter unopened.
When Conarroe made no further effort to explain, the better angel of Roth’s nature finally asserted itself. Two months later he wrote Conarroe that he was to receive an honorary degree from Penn in May: “I’d like you to be there. It doesn’t make any sense if you’re not. Can we excise the month of March—or was it February?—from our long history as friends?” Conarroe replied that he certainly wouldn’t miss “the canonization of [his] old Penn pal,” and the following year he put up $50,000 of his own money to sponsor volume 1 of the Library of America Philip Roth edition.
ANDREW WYLIE MADE a point of hiring Harvard graduates, and one of these, Lisa Halliday, caught Roth’s eye when he visited the Midtown office in the spring of 2002. Soon enough the two found themselves in an elevator together (Halliday later told him she’d timed her departure to coincide with his), and Roth asked her to lunch at the Bagel Baron on West Fifty-seventh Street, where the young woman, an aspiring writer, produced “not just perfect sentences,” he recalled, but “perfect paragraph after perfect paragraph” in the course of answering his questions about her (surprisingly working-class) origins. “Are you game?” Roth inquired as they were leaving, and she gave him a playful nod. Lori Monson, his physical therapist, was in the same building as Wylie, and subsequently Roth asked Halliday to pick up some paperwork for him there and bring it to his apartment on the Upper West Side. “Very smooth,” Halliday remembered.
As it happened, Halliday lived just two blocks away from Roth—on West Eightieth, between Amsterdam and Broadway—and during the larky affair that followed, Roth’s apartment became a kind of second home to her (he tended to see Susan Rogers more in the country); either she or Roth would pick up dinner at Zabar’s, eat it chez Roth, go to bed, then watch baseball (Halliday, from the Boston suburbs, was a big Red Sox fan). Roth remembered with special pleasure (“charming, charming, charming”) the time Halliday breezily pantomimed, atop his bed, a famous scene from Chaplin’s Modern Times. During one of their rare excursions outside Roth’s apartment—for a concert at Carnegie Hall—they were accosted by a street photographer: “No,” Roth replied to the man’s overture, “we’ll pay you not to have it taken.”
Around this time Roth also made the acquaintance of the actress Nicole Kidman, who’d been cast as Faunia Farley in The Human Stain. She and Roth had a divorce lawyer in common, Bill Beslow, who mentioned to Roth that she wanted to chat about Faunia over the phone. Roth advised her to go to a battered women’s shelter and talk to the most intelligent woman there, then suggested they discuss things further over dinner in New York. Roth’s “one and only hangout” in the city then was Russian Samovar, on West Fifty-second Street, where he was always ebulliently greeted by the owner, Roman Kaplan. “Hello, beautiful,Ý said Kaplan, when Kidman arrived on Roth’s arm, and the waitresses skittered across the street to buy disposable cameras at Rexall’s.¶ The night was a success: Roth and Kidman “hit it off,” he remembered, and on the sidewalk afterward pedestrians erupted, “Nicole! . . . Nicole!”
The Human Stain was shot mostly in Montreal, but in May the production moved to Williams College in the Berkshires, within easy driving distance of Warren, and over Memorial Day weekend Roth paid a visit to the set. “I hate to say this in front of Nicole,” he said, after watching a concert scene with Kidman and Anthony Hopkins (as Coleman Silk); Kidman bit her nails while Roth “paused for effect” (according to a Times reporter who wrote about Roth’s visit). Finally he went on: “But what she did was terrific. You could see what was happening inside her head when all she did was go to touch this guy and then decide against it.”
Until he’d met Kidman, Roth had shown little interest in the production. “You’ll have only one problem with me,” he told producer Tom Rosenberg of Lakeshore Entertainment, when they first met for lunch at the West Street Grill. “If the check doesn’t clear.” For his part Rosenberg was nervous about doing justice to what he considered “the great American novel”; the day he received the screenplay he could hardly bring himself to open the envelope, but was soon reassured that Nicholas Meyer (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution) had pulled it off. As for Roth, he considered the script “horrendously bad” and could barely force himself to sit through a rough-cut screening for his sole benefit. “Oh no!” he’d cry out in the projection room, or “Good god!” Afterward he had lunch with Rosenberg and the director, Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer). “What were you guys thinking about?” he said to the stunned pair, who tried to explain that important stuff from his novel had to be jettisoned for the sake of filmic economy. Roth insisted they put in “the most important scene” in the book—when Coleman tells Faunia he’s black—which, Roth tartly remarked, may mean cutting a few seconds from one of their jogging scenes (meant to indicate “male bonding” between Silk and Zuckerman). When they agreed to shoot the extra scene, Roth phoned Kidman and coached her on how to say the key line (“You think you’re telling me something I don’t know?”): “Just throw it away! His life’s secret!” Roth never saw the final movie, but Kidman informed him they’d cut her line and rendered the scene nonsensical.#
Roth claimed his friendship with Kidman had petered out after a few phone calls, but a reliable source said there was at least one more abortive date. Roth, who’d excitedly hired a limo for the evening, arrived at Kidman’s hotel and was taken aback when she came down to the lobby with a puzzled look, dressed in jeans. Apologetically she explained that she thought their date was for the next night, and offered to join him in the hotel bar for a glass of wine or something. Roth, however, was furious and left in a huff. Later a friend of his met Kidman and mentioned Roth. “Tell him to grow up,” the actress replied.