CHAPTER
Forty-Four
THE BENEFIT OF ROTH’S PREVIOUS BACK SURGERY, IN March 2002, began to wear off a year or so later, and soon he was in terrible pain again. Making matters worse, as always, was his inability to get another novel started after he’d finished The Plot Against America in early 2004. His “physical predicament,” he said, “was not conducive to the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and emotion recollected in tranquility”—or, as he told Ross Miller during a taped interview that summer, “I’m in a fucking rut in my life. Everything.”
These days Roth often spoke in a slurred mumble because he was taking four to six Vicodin a day, along with Klonopin to steady his nerves and Ambien to help him sleep; the last had the unfortunate effect of causing random words and images to scroll along the inside of his eyelids. Looking back, Susan Rogers wondered “how much of his self-involvement, his unawareness, a lot of what he’d say or do that was mean, was part of his medical situation.” To be sure, she’d sometimes encourage Roth to take a Vicodin to lift his spirits, since the alternative was a melancholy man in agonizing pain. But there were drawbacks as well to the playful, euphoric Roth, who sustained himself with drugs during a jolly trip to the Jersey Shore with Rogers: “How did you get here?” he kept asking her over dinner one night. “I guess someone had to be here. It might as well be you.” The point of the shtick, hardly lost on Rogers, was that theirs was a more or less random connection, versus a romantic one vis-à-vis Margot and her ilk. “He thought he was being funny,” said Rogers; “it just made me feel like crap.”
Getting off such high doses of opioids was problematic, even for so iron-willed a person as Roth. Once, he tried quitting his medications cold turkey; since he couldn’t bear being alone during such an ordeal, he persuaded Rogers to stay in Connecticut and keep him company for a weekend. “Nothing was okay,” she recalled, “nothing was right: He felt abandoned, despairing.” She’d start to put her arms around the trembling man but he didn’t want to be touched, nor spoken to when she tried verbal reassurance. Rogers wanted to phone for an ambulance, but he’d insisted everything had to remain a secret. When she could leave, at last, she drove to a friend’s house and collapsed sobbing.
One night, with Ross Miller, the couple attended a swank party on the Upper East Side, but Roth was taken ill and went home early. Miller walked with the barefoot (because of her heels) Rogers back to her room at the Athletic Club, and while they wended their way around the park she vented her frustrations as a caretaker. Miller, after all, was the only person she could talk to; none of her friends knew anything about the affair, and surely Miller of all people (so she figured) could relate to her predicament. Afterward Rogers received a note from Roth: “Ross tells me you’re not ‘cut out’ for this,” it began, proposing they take a long and perhaps permanent break from each other.
According to Rogers’s journal, Roth got back in touch two months later—on May 8, 2004—and could hardly have been more charming. He invited her to come to Warren for dinner in a couple of weeks, when he’d give her back the clothing she’d left at his house. (“So on the one hand he’s being flirtatious,” she mused, “and on the other he’s sending me back my clothes. A strange call.”) She felt very nervous on arrival—she remembered her legs shaking—even before she spotted the weary apparition hobbling toward her from his studio. Roth wrapped his arms around her and began to sob: “Every time I came out to the house,” he said, in effect, “I would walk around and say ‘Susie’s dead. Susie’s not here, she must be dead.’ ”
For a few unsettling months they were a couple again, though Rogers was looking forward to spending six weeks in Antarctica, beginning in December, on a quirky, prestigious National Science Foundation grant for writers and artists (Roth and Leon Botstein had put her up for it). Since Roth didn’t do email, they agreed Miller would be the conduit for both her personal, Roth-specific letters as well as her “Dear Family and Friends” bulletins. Roth received a few of the latter—via Conarroe—but nothing otherwise, and came to suspect Rogers was distracted by another affair, especially after Conarroe sent him an article from a gay magazine “suggesting that Antarctica was the lesbian capital of the world,” as Roth put it, “kind of a continental Provincetown with penguins.”
When Rogers returned, at the end of January 2005, Roth was in the grip of a monthlong flu and decidedly poor company, at least where Rogers was concerned. He didn’t wait up for her late-night arrival in the city, and the next morning (after she’d slept in the adjacent apartment, which Roth had recently bought to combine with his one-bedroom unit) she reported to her host’s sickbed and made desultory, one-sided conversation for less than an hour before catching a train back to Bard (“I was awful,” she admitted, laughing). A few days later he called her: “What’s the hardest part about being back?” he asked, and she replied, “The fact that it’s impossible to talk to you.” “Yeah,” he said, and hung up.
After a month of silence, Rogers wrote him a semicontrite letter. She was “stunned” and “deeply sad” that things were ending this way, though she had to admit she’d never quite been able to believe Roth loved her: “Too often I felt that your need for me came before the love and with that need came a searing hatred—not necessarily of me, but of relying on anyone—as well as a deep gratefulness. I felt both and this clouded my understanding. . . . If there is anger on your part I hope it subsides with time and that some day we’ll be able to move toward a friendship.” There was, in fact, plenty of anger. Roth wondered how she could have doubted his love after he’d dedicated his book to her and “kissed [her] in plain view of everyone” at the National Book Awards because he wanted the world to know about them.
None of that felt to you like love. You didn’t know I loved you when I said I wanted to give you a hundred thousand dollars to get you out of your tight financial straits? You didn’t know I loved you when I watched you trying on clothes at Assets and at Searles? You didn’t know I loved you when I got you a car? You didn’t know I loved you when I offered you the money to pay off the mortgage to your house? . . . Did you not even know that I loved you when I said that I loved you?
Don’t bother to answer. You never knew. You never “quite got it.”
Nor were sorrows coming single spies for Roth. Now that Rogers was out of the picture, he thought it time to deepen his dalliance with Halliday—who, however, was even then falling in love with a nice young man in Europe, Theo, whom she’d freely discussed with Roth in the past, since he’d always given her the impression that such compartmentalization was only seemly. Then, early that summer, she sold a long story (“Stump Louie”) to The Paris Review, and naturally lost no time reporting the news to Roth, who seemed not altogether pleasantly surprised. “This Theo,” he said, over dinner a night or two later. “Is this a romantic relationship?” “Yes,” she replied, wondering at his unwonted dismay. That fall she made arrangements to leave the Wylie Agency so she could devote herself to writing, and, soon after, she received a letter from a law office in Massachusetts, not far from where her grandfather lived. An anonymous benefactor wanted to pay her a monthly stipend of two thousand dollars, the letter said, provided she agree to remain in New York and not get married and so on. “This is you, right?” she asked Roth over the phone. At first he denied it, but finally said, “Okay, it’s me.” Politely but firmly she refused the money, and Roth, furious, stopped speaking to her for as long as it took (nearly a year) to admit she’d been right.
HIS WRITING CAREER, at least, was better than ever. Two weeks before publication on October 5, 2004, The Plot Against America was already “barreling up the best-seller list,” according to Frank Rich, who noted in the Times that the great novelist’s latest was “sandwiched between Clay Aiken’s memoir and The South Beach Diet” on Amazon’s Top 25. One reason the larger public had “pick[ed] up the scent,” Rich thought, was that Roth’s dystopian account of a Lindbergh presidency was in fact an exigent allegory for the latter-day debacle of George W. Bush’s misrule: “The other war, which politicians of all stripes want to pretend is a war on a tactic (terrorism) and not about religion, is, as everyone else seems to know, being fought against a bastardized form of Islam. Not unlike Jews in the 1930’s, the innocent American practitioners of that creed are aliens to many in the heartland of just folks.”
Four days before, also in the Times, Roth (who privately asserted that Bush was “the devil”) had preemptively disavowed such a reading. His only aim, he wrote, was to reconstruct the Lindbergh era with the utmost verisimilitude; however:
Kafka’s books played a strong role in the imagination of the Czech writers who were opposing the Russians’ puppet government in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960’s and 1970’s, a phenomenon that alarmed the government and caused it to prohibit the sale and discussion of his books and to remove them from the library shelves. . . . [Bush] has merely reaffirmed for me the maxim that informed the writing of all these books and that makes our lives as Americans as precarious as anyone else’s: all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy.
Roth, in short, denied the validity of an allegorical reading at the very moment he seemed to invite it.
Reviewing Roth’s “terrific political novel” for the Sunday Times, Paul Berman likewise found Kafkaesque parallels in the “sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible” world that Roth evoked with such punctilious adherence to the trappings of the era—“as if, in constructing an imaginary fascist America under President Lindbergh, Roth has erected a giant and enigmatic symbol, whose meaning he will not define.” Hardly for the first time, the Book Review verdict was contra Kakutani, who found the book “provocative but lumpy” given the awkward juxtaposition of the “psychologically vivid” Roth family with a “political landscape that remains cartoony in the extreme.” Some readers, however, found the real-life political personages in the novel vivid enough in their own right—uncomfortably so in the case of Lindbergh’s vice president, Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, whom Roth portrayed as an actual fascist who declares martial law after Lindbergh’s disappearance, rounding up prominent Jews as warmongering enemies of the state. Roth insisted he hadn’t made Wheeler et al. “behave implausibly” at any point—explaining the historical underpinnings of his story and its characters in a twenty-seven-page “Postscript”—but the executive director of the Wheeler Center at Montana State University, Gordon G. Brittan Jr., disagreed; appalled by Roth’s account, he pointed out in a letter to Arthur Schlesinger that Wheeler’s America First sympathies were based on his pacifist Quaker roots, and certainly had nothing to do with anti-Semitism or a fondness for Hitler. The great historian begged to differ, referring in his reply to a dinner party held at the home of Rexford Tugwell, a member of FDR’s “brain trust,” on February 1, 1935 (“described on pp 141–2 of my third volume in the Age of Roosevelt”), when Wheeler emphatically favored “German domination of all Europe, our domination of the Americas, and Japanese domination of the Far East,” and ominously predicted, “We shall soon be shooting up people here, like Hitler does.” “I think the Tugwell dinner vindicates Philip Roth’s portrait of Senator Wheeler,” Schlesinger concluded.
As for the violent anti-Semitism unleashed by a Lindbergh presidency, Roth was right to imagine America’s “first large-scale pogrom” as taking place in Detroit, where Henry Ford had stoked Jew hatred for decades with the help of Father Coughlin and “the dean of anti-Semites,” Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith (“Christian character is the true basis of real Americanism”), whose headquarters were congenially located there. And well before the city’s thirty thousand Jews flee across the Detroit River to Canada, Roth has scrupulously—over the course of 250 pages—depicted the insidious process whereby his “outgoing, hospitable” family become terrorized exiles in their own country. “Don’t invent, just remember,” Roth told himself whenever he got stuck—that is, pretend to remember what might have happened in the context of what did. “Compare Lincoln to Lindbergh? Boy oh boy,” the fictional Herman Roth moans on the Washington Mall, whereupon a dapper stranger refers other sightseers to the “loudmouth Jew” in their midst, while an elderly woman declares, “I’d give anything to slap his face.” “It was the most beautiful panorama I’d ever seen,” the narrator (“Philip”) muses of the mall, “a patriotic paradise, the American Garden of Eden spread before us, and we stood huddled together there, the family expelled.”
The widespread persecution of Jews, under Lindbergh, is assisted by not only good men who do nothing but Jews who actively collude. A likely model for the odious Lindberghite Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf was the leader of Newark’s Temple B’nai Jeshurun congregation, Solomon Foster,* who believed, even after Kristallnacht, that American Jews should refrain from public protest over perceived discrimination in their own country: “It is untrue, unwise and unnecessary to suggest that the Jewish people in the United States require special safeguards to our economic and political rights.” Opposing such views was Joachim Prinz of B’nai Abraham, whose daughter, Lucie, wrote Roth an appreciative note about her father’s heroic cameo in Plot. Roth replied, “Your father seemed to me the right person to resist Rabbi Bengelsdorf in my book because I think it’s just what he would have done in reality.” It was Prinz, after all, who’d predicted the Holocaust in his Rosh Hashanah eve sermon of 1939: because the iniquity of the Nazi regime hadn’t been recognized in time, he said, the casualties of war would likely include millions of Jews. “But how will this cruel fate that has befallen [German Jews] in their own land be alleviated by our great country going to war with their tormentors?” Bengelsdorf declaims to a pre-election Lindbergh rally at Madison Square Garden. “If anything, the predicament of all of Germany’s Jews would only worsen immeasurably—worsen, I fear, tragically.” As the fictional cousin Alvin remarks to Herman Roth, Bengelsdorf thus ensures a Lindbergh victory, by giving the goyim “permission” to vote for an anti-Semite who will keep them out of war.
Lindbergh’s innocuous-sounding “Just Folks” program “encouraging America’s religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society”—while mostly focusing on a single minority, Jews—also had its basis in real history, namely the long-held jingoistic grievance that Jews undermine the American “melting pot” by forming insular settlements and stubbornly clinging to “foreign” customs and observances. “The Jews of America can participate fully in the national life of their country,” says Bengelsdorf, who directs the Office of American Absorption in New Jersey. “They need no longer dwell apart, a pariah community separated from the rest.” (This while dining, chez Roth, in the pariah community of Weequahic.) “And this is not merely a dream of mine; it is the dream of President Lindbergh.” Sandy Roth is won over to Lindbergh’s dream when he’s sent to live with a gentile farming clan in Kentucky, whither the Wishnows will also be sent under the auspices of “Just Folks,” until Seldon’s mother is savagely murdered by a mob of rioting Klansmen.†
“The child’s eye degeneralizes the general,” Roth wrote in his notes, while wrestling with the challenge of dramatizing history on an intimate scale. “The way he focuses on details, it’s genuine, it connects the tragic to the trivial. History in the living room.” Originally Roth had tried writing the “far in” sections of the novel from his own seven-year-old perspective, but needed the richer diction of an adult voice—thus the narrator became an adult looking back on harrowing early experiences, with little reference to his subsequent adulthood or much historical perspective, period, beyond 1942.‡ Roth’s solution resulted in a tone that Paul Berman described as “marvelously ruminative and sorrowful—the tone of a saddened older man recalling his own childhood.” Moreover it was Roth’s intention that the reader should not be distracted from so momentous a tale by a conspicuous prose style (“relax the language,” he wrote in his notes), and hence the story ends with little Philip reflecting quite plainly on his tragic roommate, Seldon (“shattered by the malicious indignities of Lindbergh’s America”), whose predecessor was another victim, Alvin, with his mangled stump: “There was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, and until he was taken to live with his mother’s married sister in Brooklyn ten months later, I was the prosthesis.” Of course, in its strict avoidance of irony, operatic ridicule/denunciation, or other uproarious extremes of the Rothian register, the novel has a flatness that verges at times on banality. “At his best he is now a novelist of authentically tragic scope,” wrote J. M. Coetzee, having noted such a deficiency in The New York Review of Books; “at his very best he reaches Shakespearean heights. By the standard set by Sabbath’s Theater, The Plot Against America is not a major work.”
But what diminished the novel somewhat as art—a schematic but compelling plot; stylized characters; unembellished prose—arguably made it all the more palatable to the general public. With some astonishment, Dwight Garner of the Times Book Review noted its appearance at number 6 on the Fiction best-seller list for the week of October 17—the first Roth novel to appear (“SAY IT AIN’T SO”) since The Counterlife fluttered briefly around the list’s nether region (Patrimony did the same as Nonfiction in 1991). The following week Roth’s book was number 2—behind Stephen King’s Dark Tower—and it was still number 10 as late as December. Plot went on to win the W. H. Smith Award for best book in the United Kingdom (making Roth the first writer to win the prize twice), as well as the Society of American Historians’ James Fenimore Cooper Prize for the outstanding historical novel on an American theme.
Garner also reported that Roth was “poking his head out of his shell a bit more” these days: Though he refused to go on book tours, Roth was happy to sit in a New York studio and do radio interviews, albeit a bit less happy (“you feel like a goofball”) appearing on TV; he seemed uneasy when Katie Couric of Today persisted in wondering why he wrote so many books: “I write them because I don’t know how else to spend the day,” he replied at last, sincerely enough. A Newsday journalist seemed rather surprised to find Roth “a very nice man” in person, cooperative and polite, though a certain line of inquiry would always get his hackles up. When a Guardian interviewer referred to Plot as his “great Jewish history,” Roth’s rebuke was swift: “It’s my most American book,” he said. “You would never tell Ralph Ellison that Invisible Man is his most Negro book, would you?” When the cowed man remarked that Roth was “extremely difficult” to interview, Roth laughed. “I wasn’t put on this earth to make your life easy.”
Roth’s stipulations were clear: interview questions were “to be restricted to professional life, books published, literature and other writers, background (family, education, Newark). No questions on marriages, divorces, personal finances, current politics.” With regard to that last verboten subject, Roth insisted he was “just a citizen like anybody else” and so disinclined to impose his irrelevant opinions on the public. And yet, in the wake of his American Trilogy and The Plot Against America, Roth was beginning to strike readers as a leading authority on our political life—what with his keen ear for the rhetoric of demagoguery, his insight into the way the electorate is manipulated by simple messages and hoked-up threats to national security. Finally, twelve years after Plot, with the election of Donald J. Trump, Roth would seem a bona fide prophet. Both his fictional Lindbergh and the forty-fifth president, after all, had stoked nativist bigotry while expressing admiration for murderous dictators, to whom each man seemed vaguely or not so vaguely beholden via some sinister form of kompromat.
Roth’s everyday politics were roughly that of the New York Times editorial page, but in figuring out the intricate “geometry” (as Flaubert would have it) of a given novel, Roth attained a brand of “wisdom” as he saw it: “There’s a knowledge that the writing produces that is not your knowledge,” he said. “It’s produced by the demands of the narrative.” As a reality-TV celebrity rose to become the Republican nominee, then the president, pundits were increasingly apt to cite Plot as the book that “best explain[s] or illuminate[s] the political situation,” as the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, for one, noted in the Times a few weeks prior to Trump’s inauguration. Meanwhile Roth’s old dismay over the presidencies of Nixon and Bush (much less Eisenhower) began to seem quaint: “neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is,” he told The New Yorker: “ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.” For the rest of his life, Roth never missed a chance to publicize his revulsion on the subject. “I’m eagerly awaiting my White House tweet,” he liked to say.
NOW THAT ROTH’S STATUS as our greatest living novelist was all but proverbial (amid the usual robust dissent), the editors of the canonical Library of America decided it was time for a definitive edition of Roth’s work—making him only the third living writer to enjoy that distinction, after Eudora Welty in 1998 and Bellow in 2003; Welty and Bellow, however, had been ninety and eighty-eight respectively, and Welty had since died and Bellow was soon to die. Roth, at seventy-two, was “still reinventing himself,” as the Times put it, and was energetic enough to collaborate actively with the project. “It’s like being able to talk to Henry James about The Portrait of a Lady,” said publisher Max Rudin.§ James, in fact, was the only writer with more volumes in the series—fourteen to Roth’s ultimate ten—and, with James’s New York Edition in mind, Rudin asked Roth whether he’d be willing to write special prefaces for each volume. Roth declined, and when Rudin suggested that Nathan Zuckerman write them instead, Roth didn’t deign to reply.
Roth’s first choice to edit his Library of America edition was his fastidious copy editor, Roslyn Schloss; the LOA, however, preferred an academic for the job, so Roth proposed Ross Miller, who certainly knew Roth’s work inside and out, and was often impressive in discussion, though his previous labors in this line weren’t altogether reassuring. Roth had been dissatisfied with the moralistic tone of his publisher’s reading guide for The Dying Animal (“What do you think of the age difference between Consuela and the Monster?” he paraphrased a typical question), and asked Miller to write it instead. “These are awful!” he said of Miller’s questions, which, as Rogers recalled, were on the pretentious “lit-scholar” side. (“I wouldn’t myself know how to begin to answer half these questions, nor would I even try,” Roth complained about his paperback publisher’s Sabbath’s Theater guide. “They smell of the unworldly classroom. Existential odyssey. Homer, Dante, Virgil. Spare poor Sabbath the highbrowism.”) After loudly denouncing Miller’s work during a long walk with Rogers, Roth returned to his studio and wrote the thing himself. “Why is Kepesh’s description of Consuela’s vulva so detailed?” he asked the reader, and also wondered why “emancipated manhood” (as Kepesh would have it) lacks social status: “If Kepesh were gay or female, would that alter your response to the book?”
For the Library of America, a volume editor’s duties entail writing an appendix of Notes on the Texts, as well as a ten-thousand-word Chronology of the author’s life. The latter, in Roth’s case, was composed by Roth himself, originally for a special tribute issue of the Swiss magazine Du, though the “Chronik von Leben und Werk” was credited to Ross Miller—in both its German and LOA/English versions—so Roth could avoid the appearance of a self-serving motive. He also took it upon himself to update the Chronology in subsequent volumes, and wrote almost every word of his jacket copy (“It wasn’t that Ross couldn’t do it; I could do it better”).
He also might have thought he could take a strong hand in writing his own biography, especially with his best friend at least nominally at the helm. When approached in 2000 (via Conarroe) by another would-be biographer, Roth had replied that he wouldn’t want one “even if it was Boswell”; Ross Miller, however, was another matter. As Roth would later sheepishly explain, he thought Miller had “mature[d] a good deal” in the seven years since he’d written that ribald book proposal Roth had so vehemently rejected. As ever, too, Roth worried he might die at any time, in which case Bloom’s version of his character would stand forever. Miller, of all people, knew the other side of the story.
On May 4, 2004, Roth’s publisher issued a press release alerting the world to Houghton’s acquisition of two books by Ross Miller: a “full-scale biography of Philip Roth” and Free at Last: Why the Jews Discovered America, about “the historical circumstances of the Jewish immigration to the U. S.” Miller’s book proposal for the biography, this time, had been in the more sober form of his Du chronology (that is to say, Roth’s Du chronology). Lisa Halliday was still at the Wylie Agency when the deal was struck for a biography, and while preparing some of its paperwork she felt a distinct sense of foreboding: “I just thought, ‘There’s only so much you can control.’ ” That summer Miller gave an extended interview to the St. Petersburg Times, likening his book about Roth to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, with two key differences: (1) “Boswell had to wait till Johnson died,” and (2) “I’m not in this biography. I will not appear in this book.” The second point seemed plausible given that Miller’s friendship with his subject was strictly “intellectual,” or so he claimed (“We don’t go bowling together. . . . [I]t’s all business”)—that, indeed, he was more of an “editor” to the novelist: “You have a great heavyweight fighter and they need a trainer, or a great pianist and they need a coach. That’s really the sort of relationship. This is a fragile thing we have. We’re on a tightrope.”
Finally, on the fraught topic of Roth and the Nobel Prize, Miller had this to say: “He’s been on the short list of two or three at least a few times. It’s inevitable. . . . His feeling is, let’s get it over with.” Roth’s “furious” response to Miller, as he recalled, went something like this: “Why did you say that? It isn’t so! . . . If I had the minutest chance you can be sure you killed whatever minute chance I had of getting it. Luckily I don’t give a shit. But why do you say things that aren’t true?” “No mas,” Miller replied.
WHEN ROTH RECEIVED an honorary degree from Harvard in 2003, he, Miller, and Rogers took the Bellows out to dinner at the Ritz-Carlton; Saul seemed frail and depressed that night, so Roth and Miller sat on either side of him, trying to cheer him up. Bellow’s final novel, Ravelstein (2000)—a roman à clef about his friendship with fellow Committee member Allan Bloom—had seemed weak to Roth, but he forbore to write a frank critique and simply said he was “out of sympathy” with the hero and therefore an unfit reader. Four years later, the only novel Bellow wanted to read was The Plot Against America—“Where’s the book?” he’d call to Janis, who knew which one he meant—opening at any page and reading as if for the first time. “I’ve been thinking about Lindbergh,” he said to Roth very near the end. “He always moves away from my unclean presence.” Roth cherished these rare glimpses of lucidity. Janis always knew when Roth was on the phone, because she’d hear her husband laughing in his old way—throwing his head back—after Roth had treated him to some “delicious” joke. And Roth kept calling even after Bellow was too confused to know who he was; once Bellow responded with a voice “so old, so dead,” that Roth burst into tears. “Do you want to speak to your sister?” Bellow said (meaning Janis) the last time Roth called.
When Bellow died on April 5, 2005, Roth was in the midst of a grinding siege of back pain (he’d scheduled another surgery for the following month). Still, he managed the flight to Boston, with Wylie, then a three-hour drive from Bellow’s house in Brookline to his burial site in Brattleboro, Vermont. Bellow had wanted to be buried with traditional Jewish rites, so the service was in Hebrew, with no eulogies, and later the mourners took turns shoveling dirt into the grave. By then Roth was almost crazed with pain, and had to walk back and forth to a bench some fifty feet from the grave site—“like a kind of brooding Hamlet,” Bellow’s son Greg observed in his memoir, Saul Bellow’s Heart, “[Roth] wandered the edges of the funeral in deep thought.” Greg also mentioned that his own final graveside words were quoted in Roth’s Everyman—“ ‘Sleep easy, Pop’ ”—but declined to include what followed: “any note of tenderness, grief, love, or loss was terrifyingly absent from his voice.”
Shortly after the funeral, Roth reported to Solotaroff that Bellow’s middle son, Adam, “was the most visibly wracked, perhaps because his feelings about Saul are the most twisted”; within a few months, however, he decided that both older sons (he liked the youngest, Daniel) were “shallow shits.” Adam had lost his good opinion by writing a New York Times op-ed about his neglectful father (“Missing: My Father”) for what would have been Saul’s ninetieth birthday: “We had no family occasions,” Adam wrote. “He just sat up there like Wotan on his mountain, in Vermont, or in his aerie overlooking Lake Michigan, and I made pilgrimages by bus or car or plane.” “I wonder if this is the first of a series to be published in your paper by the neglected children of divorce,” Roth wrote in a rebuttal he never sent.
If this is the case, you will have millions of submissions from aggrieved adults like Mr. Bellow to choose from, and I assume that after you have finished with the children of dead Nobel Prize winners you will lend space on your Op Ed page to the similarly neglected fifty-and sixty-year-old children of dead taxi drivers, dead plumbers, dead prize fighters, dead neurosurgeons, dead military personnel, etc.
They too have a right for their lamentations to be gullibly taken at face value once the imperfect parent is unable to challenge the justness of possible simplifications, fabrications, and self-serving distortions of the truth.
This was mild next to what Roth thought about Greg’s book, Saul Bellow’s Heart, published in 2013: “The unworldliness, the lack of imagination, the terrible prose, the monomania, the vindictive spirit seasoned with self-congratulatory expressions of forgiveness and love,” he wrote a friend, “—none of this makes this book easy reading. I think the book is an example of what is beautifully called ‘pissing on the grave.’ ” Roth had always referred to Greg as Schmucko, and in the margins of Greg’s memoir he scribbled a running commentary of “Oy” and suchlike glosses, until he wrote “I quit” on page 35; but he didn’t quit: “He was being ironic, schmuck,” Roth riposted on page 211, next to where Greg interprets his father’s invariable “Hunky dory”—when asked about his health during that last year of life—to mean he “was too far gone to realize how frail he was.” “You wicked bastards!” Everyman rails against his disaffected sons, Randy and Lonny. “You sulky fuckers! You condemning little shits!”
Preoccupied with filial resentment and thoughts of the grave, Roth began a new novel the day after Bellow’s funeral. The Life and Death of a Male Body¶ was to be “a story about a man’s mortality from the perch of the operating room, that is, the history of his diseases”—a man who shared his creator’s aversion to the metaphysical. A few months before, when Max Rudin’s second child was born sixteen weeks premature, Roth had phoned every few days to ask how the boy was doing. At one point Rudin hesitated to share some piece of good news, because he didn’t want “to jinx anything,” and Roth shot back, “Nothing you say will make any difference.” Rudin always remembered the moment as a nice instance of the staunch “Jewish rationalism” that informed Roth’s everyday thinking and thus Everyman.
The sprawling, intricately layered Plot had exhausted something in Roth; he no longer had the “mental stamina” for big novels, and, like Bellow toward the end of his career, would henceforth content himself with the taut architecture of novellas. The fewer the motifs, or “props,” of a narrative, the more potently they resonate for readers, and in Everyman Roth was particularly inspired by the jewelry shop owned by the hero’s father (who calls it Everyman’s so that gentile customers won’t be put off by his Jewish name). One day, by way of research, Roth walked along Broadway until he came to a shop with a Dominican owner who was happy to break out his jewelry loupe and show Roth the intricacies of clocks and watches, carats—accoutrements that dovetail beautifully in the final passage of Everyman (“I felt very happy that day,” said Roth), where the dying man remembers bodysurfing as a boy:
Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler’s loupe engraved with his father’s initials at the perfect, priceless planet itself—at his home, the billion-, the trillion-, the quadrillion-carat planet Earth! . . . Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.