CHAPTER
Forty-Eight
BACK IN 1984, DAVID PLANTE HAD OBSERVED WHAT A relief it was to be “less and less obsessed” with sex, and Roth said, “I’ll be obsessed when I’m eighty exactly as I was when I was eighteen.” He didn’t quite make it. The seventy-four-year-old wasn’t entirely impotent with Kaysie Wimberly—his final lover—but he was mostly content to cuddle and read. “I’ve got a sweet Texas girl,” he wrote Al Alvarez, “but she’s only on lone [sic], until she can find someone who will give her babies.” One potential baby-giver wondered about all the Roth novels on her shelf, and the ingenuous young woman admitted she’d had a fling with the author. The fellow was appalled: it just so happened, he said, that Roth once hit on a friend of his at an Upper West Side farmers’ market! (“The guy’s got a terrible reputation,” Kaysie laughed in 2012.) He insisted she stop seeing such a notorious reprobate, even as a friend, and Kaysie did as she was told. Regretfully she wrote a farewell note to her “precious Philip,” assuring him of her love and admiration. Roth replied: “A long time ago I told you you had a soul. You do. I don’t mean it in the religious sense but in the poetic sense. You’re gracious and kind and just as lovely as I thought.”
No desperate melancholy ensued, as with Brigit’s departure, but it was still a blow, and again his friends Ben Taylor and Joel Conarroe took turns keeping an eye on him (“Pretty grim evening with Philip,” the latter reported, describing their friend as “terribly discouraged about being, at his age, alone”). Meanwhile Roth dedicated Indignation to “K.W.,” and when The Wall Street Journal inquired about the dedicatee’s identity, Roth replied, “That’s a mystery. I’m not telling.”
For a year or so, he absorbed himself in his work. Then, at a Christmas party given by the painter Caio Fonseca, he met the estranged wife of novelist Richard Price, Judy Hudson, who soon dropped him a note to the effect that she’d “adore” having a drink with him. Roth suggested they make it dinner instead, and thereafter playfully made a habit of saying “adore” when a less hyperbolic word would do. Hudson was a vivacious, slender woman, and the two enjoyed each other’s company; by now, however, Roth was apt to shrink from the physical. (“I am well though I could use a new left hip, a new left shoulder, and a new libido,” he wrote the Kunderas. “They’re all wearing out.”) “You kidding?” he’d say, when she’d suggest a degree of intimacy, even if it was simply kissing or holding hands—though he was still capable of romantic gestures after a fashion: a virtuosic whistler, Roth would sometimes phone Hudson and whistle a tune from beginning to end, then hang up; also he’d emerge from the bath with a towel around his waist, buffed and scented, and do a kind of Theda Bara dance with a second towel as a scarf.
That summer of 2009, as Roth was finishing Nemesis, Hudson joined him most weekends in Warren—the latest companion to marvel at his discipline, the ironclad sameness of his days. Every morning, after breakfast, he’d do his exercise/stretch routine, then work until late afternoon (breaking briefly and laconically for lunch), swim with Hudson for an hour or so, work until dinner, then read; finally the two would retire to separate bedrooms. By September it was clear they “didn’t have the kind of connection that could go any further,” as Roth put it, “and so we mutually agreed to part.”
Also he’d begun (or resumed) seeing a tall, striking blonde, Mona,* almost twenty years younger than Hudson. The two had met at Updike’s memorial on March 19, 2009—Roth’s seventy-sixth birthday; he and some friends (Conarroe, Taylor, Thurman, one or two others) were adjourning to Russian Samovar for dinner, and Roth coaxed Mona into joining them. A couple of dates followed, but they lost touch during the summer, when Roth stayed in the country and buried himself in work; back in New York that fall, he began seeing the woman more seriously. “I didn’t know that my sex life was over,” he said three years later; certainly he found Mona desirable in an objective way, but not even Viagra availed him during a necking session, and the two decided to remain affectionate friends. “You sure you don’t want to reconsider?” she asked him during a walk in the country. “Honey, it isn’t you,” said Roth. “It’s my time.”
As he advanced into old age, Roth’s peers were all the more inclined to view him as one of the greatest and most devoted fiction writers the country has ever produced. In 2007, the young novelist Nicole Krauss had thought to let Roth know, in writing, what “a peculiar, sustaining solace” his work had offered her over the years:
Something to do with your lifelong examination of the writing mind, its needs and paradoxes, its incompatibility with so much else, and also its fierce pleasures. . . .
But I hope you will forgive me for also adding that I have often been struck by a sharp loneliness when reminded of the fact that you won’t always be there, writing up in Connecticut. . . . I suppose it isn’t any longer just your words, but their consolidated shape—the idea of you—which has brought me such comfort all these years, and I expect I won’t know quite what to do without its reassurance.
A few weeks later, the two met for coffee at Nice Matin, and Krauss asked Roth whether he’d been writing that day. Alas, no, since he’d recently finished Indignation and had yet to feel the first ill-starred stirrings of The Humbling. “It’s terrible,” he said. “I’m a complete amateur. . . . On my way here I found myself wondering, ‘What is a novel?’ ” That afternoon he wrote a list of “commandments” for Krauss to hang above her desk, including “IT’S NOT GOING TO GET BETTER, RESIGN YOURSELF TO THIS.”
“I’M AT THE POINT where I think it’s shit and wish I’d never written it,” Roth had written Paul Theroux, while bracing for publication of The Humbling, his penultimate novel. Anxious to redeem himself, he sat down with a legal pad and made a list of historical events, especially menacing ones, that he’d lived through and understood. There was the war, of course, but he’d pretty much covered that in Sabbath’s Theater, whereas anti-Semitism had given him The Plot Against America. After some thought he circled the word “polio,” and began making notes. “What happened?” he scribbled at the top of a typed page: “This happened in Newark in 1944, the year nineteen thousand cases of infantile paralysis—or poliomyelitis—were reported nationwide, constituting the worst outbreak in America in nearly thirty years.” In fact, only a single childhood friend of Roth had gotten the disease—a boy named Jerry, who lived around the corner—but that was enough to cause panic among the parents of Weequahic. Bess forbade her sons to swim in the public pool or eat chazerai at Syd’s and the like, while reminding them again and again to check themselves for symptoms such as headache, stiff neck, and nausea.
Desperate to avoid another dread verdict of “sketchy,” “slight,” and/or “pallid,” Roth did whatever he could to enrich his narrative. He phoned his cousin Sandy Kuvin, an eminent infectious diseases doctor, and asked him to explain in detail how polio is transmitted and how it was treated in the years before the Salk vaccine. And what of the social ramifications? His friend Mia Farrow had contracted polio when she was nine, and on returning to school (she told Roth) the meaner kids had treated her as a pariah: Eww! Here she comes! Don’t touch me! She’ll give you polio!—whereupon she’d run after them with an outstretched finger. One day at the St. Bart’s pool, on Fifty-first and Park, Roth saw a man roughly his own age remove a brace from his leg while changing, and Roth asked him whether he’d had polio; the man said yes, and they sat talking for a while. Finally Roth approached his old friend Stu Lehman and asked whether they could discuss a subject everyone had tactfully avoided when they were young: the experience of losing his mother as a boy, and, like Bucky Cantor in Nemesis, being raised by his grandparents.
Late that spring of 2009, Roth submitted the tenth draft of his novel to the publisher, but when he examined the copyedited manuscript, it wouldn’t do: “In places the cadences seem off and the writing automatic and the diction less than alive,” he wrote Andrea Schulz, his new editor at Houghton. He asked them to stop production while he went over it again. And again. Finally, in August, he relinquished “Draft 12A,” wearily admitting he wasn’t altogether happy but he didn’t “know how to complicate it anymore.” Then he became depressed. “I don’t really have other interests,” he told Alvarez in 2004. “My interest is in solving the problems presented by writing a book. That’s what stops my brain spinning like a car wheel in the snow, obsessing about nothing.”
A problem that had become all but insurmountable while writing Nemesis—indeed, the main reason he’d had to limit himself to the shorter form in the first place—was his “frayed” memory. He could no longer keep the whole story in his head, or even, sometimes, just the previous day’s work. “For instance,” he explained to a friend, “I know last night we had dinner together, but I don’t remember anything we talked about.” Still, the thought of having nothing more to write, nothing to do at all, was simply intolerable. “Give me subjects,” he said to friends. “Let’s think of catastrophes. . . .” The list making went on for a couple of months, but nothing seemed worth the wonderful agony of another book. Hoping “a dose of fictional juice” might help, Roth reread the masters who’d inspired him to become a writer some sixty years before: Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Turgenev, Faulkner, Hemingway. “Maybe it’s over,” he thought, and finally began rereading his own work from his latest book going backward, “casting a cold eye” and deciding, at last, à la the great heavyweight Joe Louis, “I did the best I could with what I had.”
“Why am I so happy?” he wrote on October 14, 2010. “I haven’t had any serious back pain for well over a year. And something more: for the first time in my adult life, I haven’t written a word of fiction for over a year. Fourteen months now.” Roth was free—not in the creative sense, but rather in the absence thereof. “The tyranny of writing and the tyranny of sex—overthrown,” he wrote Miles. “Life hasn’t been like this since I was ten and pre-pubescent.” Nor was he entirely idle. The previous summer, while groping for fictional fodder, he’d begun to pore over letters and photographs he’d amassed during his almost forty years in Connecticut, which soon became “an exercise in recollection”: The better to assist a new biographer,† he began writing a kind of ramshackle account of his life—“without worrying about sentences or repetitiousness or maundering. Much more pleasant. And useful.”
ROTH’S FINAL NOVEL was widely hailed as “a triumphant return to high form” (Financial Times)—a reception signaled by his friends’ enthusiastic (or at least relieved) early responses, the most prescient of which was Miles’s: “Stop publishing. . . . In your depressed state, I wonder if you realize how great a book it is. It’s a masterpiece, Philip. It’s flawless. I don’t know that it’s your greatest book because, yes, others were more ambitious. What I do know is that you will never top this. You will never write a better book to have remembered as your envoi.” Compared with The Humbling, certainly, Nemesis seems a minor masterpiece or anyway close enough, and most critics were nothing but charitably disposed. Leah Hager Cohen’s front-page notice in The New York Times Book Review was almost giddily effusive. Admitting to an early distaste for Roth’s books (“Oh: these are for boys”), she’d revisited them “with mounting, marveling pleasure” in preparation for the present assignment: “Before you stands a convert,” she announced. “I come to swallow the leek.” Michiko Kakutani, however, was acerbic as ever: once again she declared a late-Roth novel “pallid” and indulged in a last, damning tautology (“predictable” and “by the numbers”), while faintly praising Roth’s “professionalism” and “granular period detail.”
Roth let it be known he’d reread Camus’s The Plague while working on his polio novel—this, he noted, “largely to avoid accidentally repeating any of his scenes or motifs”; J. M. Coetzee, in The New York Review of Books, pointed out that Camus, for his part, was familiar with Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and all three were part of “a line of writers who have used the plague condition to explore the resolve of human beings and the durability of their institutions under attack by an invisible, inscrutable, and deadly force.” Roth considered Dr. Rieux “the perfect narrator” for The Plague, though he professed to be puzzled as to why Camus had seen fit to conceal Rieux’s identity until the end—and yet, such an approach would seem the most notable affinity between Nemesis and The Plague. Roth’s first-person-plural narrator remains a mystery for some two-thirds of the story, a device Roth appropriated not from Camus but, again, from the beloved opening pages of Madame Bovary, in which the anonymous “we”—who remember Charles Bovary and his funny cap at school that first day—simply vanish after a few pages, never to return, the way Zuckerman vanishes after the first eighty or so pages of American Pastoral. In the case of Nemesis, the anonymous plural narrator serves mainly to suggest “a community that’s in peril,” as Roth would have it, and gradually transpires to be one of Bucky’s playground charges (hence his curious tendency to refer to Bucky as “Mr. Cantor”), Arnie Mesnikoff, a boy who got polio that summer.
Roth needed to defer Arnie’s story until the end, when he meets his former playground director and embittered fellow polio victim, Bucky, now a wizened middle-aged man and “maniac of the why”—akin to Rothian heroes going back to Gabe Wallach, of Letting Go, who morbidly prize their own virtue and poison their lives as a result. “We can be severe judges of ourselves when it is in no way warranted,” the father of Bucky’s fiancée warns him. “A misplaced sense of responsibility can be a debilitating thing.” After standing his ground against the Italian toughs who come “spreadin’ polio” by spitting on the sidewalk near his feet, Bucky becomes “an idolized, protective, heroic older brother” to the boys of Weequahic—a sacred trust he betrays, as he sees it, when he buckles to his fiancée’s plea to escape the epidemic and work at a summer camp in the mountains. Bucky’s moment of weakness leads swiftly to tragedy: three boys in his orbit promptly get polio, whereupon the entire camp is shut down. “Who brought polio here if not me?” Bucky decides, unable to forgive himself, never mind a malign deity who tortures children for sport.
“Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God,” Arnie reflects. Nemesis is another Roth novel that might have been titled Blindsided, about a hero who simply can’t accept that sometimes there is no why (an idea that served Roth well when assessing his own culpability in respect to certain personal debacles). “He does not accept the absurdity of it,” Roth wrote in his notes, “that’s the tragedy because he has to pay the price. He transforms the tragic into guilt.” Especially in the case of Nemesis, Roth was more interested in “psychological soundness” than “philosophical reverberations,” and so was intrigued by a letter dated April 19, 2009 (around the time he was finishing his tenth draft), from an old Weequahic resident—a woman who hadn’t learned until the age of eleven that, three years before her birth in 1948, her parents had lost two boys to polio a day apart. When she asked her mother whether the boys were in heaven, the woman replied that “they were just buried in the earth. . . . She never discussed the boys with me again. I knew that she was an unhappy person, and, as I got older, I realized that she wanted me to share her suffering and her view that the world was a terrible and frightening place.” Roth used elements of the story in his subsequent drafts.
Correcting a reader’s impression that his hero’s nickname was in homage to another Weequahic playground director of the forties—Louis “Bucky” Harris—Roth pointed out that the much younger Cantor was given the name “because its associations to manliness were savagely ironic for a boy who winds up the way Bucky does.” The tragedy echoes in the final pages—Roth’s favorite passage—an exquisitely detailed flashback to the glory days of Bucky’s youth: “Running with the javelin aloft, stretching his throwing arm back behind his body, bringing the throwing arm through to release the javelin high over his shoulder—and releasing it then like an explosion—he seemed to us invincible.” “Invincible” was the last word of the novel, and an apt way to end Roth’s thirty-one-book career.
SALES FOR NEMESIS were rather disappointing—it peaked, briefly, at number 16 on the Times best-seller list—but Roth claimed not to care as long as his usual fans bought it. Besides, one of his fondest jeremiads over the years was about the inevitable decline of “people who read serious books seriously and consistently”—Roth readers, in short. In a September 3, 1997, “Health Watch” column in the Times, Dr. Bradley Bute had urged people to “[t]ake the library out of the bathroom” because it encouraged prolonged straining at stool; “THE END OF ALL READING” Roth scribbled at top before sending to friends. By the time of Roth’s retirement, given the more and more ubiquitous “gratifications of the screen,” things had become far worse. Someday soon, said Roth, reading novels would be as “cultic” an activity as reading “Latin poetry.”
He considered himself an anachronism—out of touch with America and crankily disinclined to keep up with the new gadgetry. His longtime copy editor, Roslyn Schloss, stuck with “the Philip M. Roth Fax Machine” for the benefit of a single client who refused to communicate via email (except with Kaysie), and he also went on using WordPerfect 5.1 (from 1989) until the bitter end. Eventually, rather grudgingly, he availed himself of the internet. In 2007, he bought an IBM laptop that he used strictly for that purpose—that is, for ordering his breakfast cereal from Fresh Direct, and books from Amazon and Alibris; finally, in 2010, he let a few more people know his email address. Certainly he was ready for more distractions, now that he’d stopped writing and even, for the most part, reading fiction. “Fiction has been the heart of my intellectual life since I was eighteen or nineteen years old,” he explained to the Klímas, “—writing, reading, studying, and teaching it—and now, nearly sixty years later, I seem finally to have lost, not my love and respect for fiction, but my taste for it.” He admitted as much publicly in a 2011 interview with the Financial Times, adding that he got pleasure nowadays from looking at “old newspapers”: “I have to get some pleasure,” he laughed.
His engagement with current events was enlivened somewhat by presidential elections, and during the 2008 primaries he threw his support to Barack Obama: “He’s an attractive man, he’s smart, he happens to be tremendously articulate. His position in the Democratic Party is more or less okay with me. And I think it would be important to American blacks if he became president.” A little more than a year after Obama’s inauguration, Roth was interviewed by an Italian journalist who wondered why he found the president “nasty, vacillating, and mired in the mechanics of power”—this according to an interview Roth had allegedly given one Tommaso Debenedetti of the right-wing Libero. “But I have never said anything of the kind!” Roth protested. “Obama, in my opinion, is fantastic.” Afterward he asked Judith Thurman, who spoke Italian, to look into the matter. She discovered another interview with John Grisham, who was also quoted (falsely) as saying hard things about Obama, and eventually some seventy fraudulent Debenedetti interviews with American writers (as many as five with Roth alone) who putatively reviled the president.‡
Roth’s real-life fondness for Obama, at any rate, appeared to be reciprocated. On March 2, 2011, Roth was summoned back to the White House as one of eleven recipients of the National Humanities Medal, a roster including his old friends Bob Brustein and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as James Taylor, Sonny Rollins, and Van Cliburn. “How many young people have learned to think,” Obama paused, deadpan, as he presented Roth’s medal in the East Room, “by reading the exploits of Portnoy and his complaints?” Amid laughter (“that is something George Bush could never have pulled off,” Conarroe punned), Roth headed to the podium, where Obama hung the medal around his neck and murmured, “You’re not slowing down, are you?” “Oh, Mr. President,” Roth replied, “I’m slowing down, all right.”
AN HONOR THAT WOULD prove less delightful befell Roth two months later, when he was named the fourth winner of the Man Booker International Prize, worth £60,000 and awarded biennially for a body of work that’s published in English, whether originally or in translation; past winners included Chinua Achebe, in 2007, and Alice Munro two years later. The chair of the three-person jury, Rick Gekoski, said that Roth’s work had “stimulated, provoked and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience” for half a century, and “his imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally.”
That was on May 18, and so far so good. Seven hours after the award was announced, however, it became known that one of the judges, Carmen Callil, had bitterly withdrawn from the jury in protest over its selection of Roth. “He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book,” she said. “It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.” The other two judges, Gekoski and novelist Justin Cartwright, reiterated that they felt “strongly and passionately” that Roth was the right choice, while The Telegraph deplored Callil’s outburst with a May 19 editorial concluding that Roth “more than deserves the Booker judges’ recognition.”
The next day, Callil defended herself more temperately, if not coherently, with a piece in The Guardian (“Why I quit the Man Booker International panel”). Her main point was that her aversion to Roth was nothing personal. She’d hoped the prize would go, this time, to a work in translation, since it’s important to “widen our understanding of other countries, other cultures,” and besides the previous award had gone to the “truly great” North American writer, Munro; as for Roth, “He is clever, harsh, comic, but his reach is narrow. . . . Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there.” Having described an author who’d never written the American Trilogy or certain other ambitious, non-narrow, non-solipsistic novels, Callil told a reporter that Roth’s “best book, American Pastoral,” was “wonderful about women”—the better not to seem bothered by Roth’s alleged misogyny; meanwhile she claimed the whole “kerfuffle” was “an ad feminam attack from the boys.” To be sure, Callil had reason to feel defensive, seeing as how she was a founder of the feminist Virago Press, English publisher of Leaving a Doll’s House.
As Roth saw it (not altogether mistakenly), his reputation was still tainted by his ex-wife’s second memoir. “Refused to answer impertinent question about Claire’s book,” he noted on September 10, 2010, when CBS Sunday Morning featured a spot on Roth, which included this exchange with interviewer Rita Braver:
BRAVER: Your former wife, Claire Bloom, claimed that you don’t even like women.
ROTH [very quietly; composed but seething]: Let’s forget that.
BRAVER: You don’t want to talk about her. That was a bad episode in your life.
ROTH: No, I don’t want to comment on libels.
A few years before, Norman Manea had served on the jury for the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and mentioned to Roth that his fellow judges had rejected Roth “vehemently” because of his “treatment of women”—both in his fiction and according to Bloom. Indeed, Roth was hardly alone in suspecting that Doll’s House was the main touchstone for the Swedish Academy, whose prize was intended for “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Given the manifold implications of that criterion—said another Bloom (Harold)—Roth’s prospects for the Nobel were roughly nil: “He’s not terribly politically correct, you know, and they are.”
The same spring as the Callil controversy, Roth stumbled on galleys for a reference book to be published by Facts on File, Critical Companion to Philip Roth, whose editor, Ira Nadel, had included this sentence about “Erda” (Bloom’s pseudonym for Inga) in his introductory biographical essay: “However, a familiar pattern emerged, characteristic of [Roth’s] life with women: With intimacy increasing, his anxieties over being emotionally engulfed by a woman caused him to withdraw.” Roth ended up paying $61,022.29 to his lawyers at Milbank Tweed, who forced Nadel to delete the sentence and rewrite the surrounding passage. Next Roth hired a research assistant to determine how widely the seepage from Bloom’s book had spread throughout the academy; among the several scholarly articles citing Doll’s House was one in Philip Roth Studies that described Bloom’s “surprisingly compassionate yet devastating memoir” as an “indispensable” source on Roth’s life.
The final straw, for Roth, was his discovery that the aforementioned Nadel had signed a contract with Oxford University Press to write “a full-scale biography” of Roth, at whose urging Wylie informed Nadel that he didn’t have permission to quote from Roth’s work, nor would Roth’s friends and associates cooperate in any way: “I trust that you will make any prospective publisher aware of this, so as not to misrepresent your position.” Another letter followed from Stacey Rappaport of Mil-bank Tweed, who admonished Nadel to “consider the credibility of any sources on which you choose to rely in writing such a biography,” particularly the “false and defamatory” Leaving a Doll’s House.
“I felt unfairly misunderstood and started screaming,” Roth quoted his ex-wife’s memoir for the epigraph to his 295-page rebuttal, “Notes for My Biographer,” which he began that spring and finished ten months later. “Another writer my age awaiting a biography and awaiting death (which is worse?) might not care,” Roth wrote of Bloom’s book. “I do. I can no longer allow her falsifications to impinge on my personal and professional reputation. There are no mythical Erdas here.” Roth wasn’t concerned with the first nine chapters of Doll’s House; he began with page 143—where, in 1975, he and Bloom bump into each other on Madison Avenue—and proceeded sequentially from there. Two pages later, Bloom begins to discuss Roth’s first marriage to “Margaret Michaelson” [sic], the “shiksa to end all shiksas” who provided the model for the ghastly Maureen in My Life as a Man—a novel that Bloom examines as a kind of “medico-moral” (Roth) skeleton key to his relations with women, toward whom he harbors “a deep and irrepressible rage.” Bloom’s critique of the novel, said Roth, “is trifling as literary criticism and dubious as psychology, but as defamation it packs a punch and so requires scrutiny.” Roth accused Bloom of indulging in what college lit students are taught to identify as the “biographical fallacy” and “hasty generalization.” “Tarnopol’s rage may be ‘deep and irrepressible’ but it is hardly invisible,” Roth wrote. “And it has been provoked very specifically not by ‘women,’ as Bloom would have it, but by a wife, Maureen, who has deceived Tarnopol and viciously betrayed him.”
Roth swiftly moved on to what he called the leitmotif of Bloom’s book: “She is repeatedly being stripped of her will and overpowered and wronged by ruthless men—whether Hilly Elkins, her ‘voyeuristic and sadistic’ second husband, or her despised costar and lover Anthony Quinn, each with his abundant virility, or me with my ‘razor-sharp wit.’ In fact, the person she was most intimidated by was her teenage daughter.” As Roth had proceeded with the long-shunned task of reading Bloom’s second memoir, it occurred to him that it was nothing so much as an exhaustive exercise in mollifying Anna by shifting the blame for the “family debacle” away from her and entirely onto the “Machiavellian strategist”—the same man, that is, whom Bloom had often praised outside the indictment of Doll’s House: “I remember the good times with gratitude and love,” she tearfully admitted on Stars and Mas; her “marvelous marriage” to Roth, she told Leonard Lopate, was “the best relationship of her life.”
Roth’s greatest scorn was reserved for the final chapter about Erda/Inga, “The Truth,” which, he said, should have been renamed “The Lie.” Roth was incensed by the suggestion that Erda/Inga had to be “cruelly coerced” to leave her husband because of her “new relationship” with Roth, and Inga agreed: “I don’t think it was a very good description of who I am at all,” she remarked of the meekly submissive Erda—whose real-life counterpart was gleefully described by Roth as his “willing and gloriously happy accomplice in adultery for close to twenty years.” In “Notes,” Roth provided a droll counterversion of his long affair with Inga “as plainly, factually, and fully as [he] can tell it”—disguising real-life details with underlined substitutions (“Polish” for Norwegian, etc.)—but he concluded the story on a note of outrage: “As is so much else in Bloom’s memoir, Erda and our ‘several months’ together, during which, according to Bloom, I mistreated her in the extreme and tormented her in order to make her do my bidding, are nothing less than a vile and actionable fantasy of the author.”
Roth thought he’d found the “right tone” for his rejoinder and decided, as he recalled, “Fuck it. I’m gonna publish.” A little reluctantly, Andrew Wylie gave the manuscript to Houghton, which offered a middling advance that Roth was glad to accept. Meanwhile, in addition to the in-house lawyer’s reading, Roth shelled out another $85,000 to Milbank Tweed to vet the book independently. Milbank worried about the anti-Semitic remarks Roth attributed to his former wife: “If Bloom asserts and proves that these quotations materially differ from her actual statements in a way that is damaging to her reputation you could be subject to potential liability.” Also, while Milbank didn’t foresee a problem with Roth’s portrayal of Bloom’s basic fragility, they hoped he was able to substantiate more serious allegations such as her conversing with and petting her dead mother, or running around fields “screaming like a lunatic character in an animated cartoon” (as Roth put it).
Roth was looking forward to the happy task of marshaling witnesses and documentation, but his friends were unanimously opposed to publication. Jack Miles and Nicole Krauss both wondered, and expected others to wonder, why Roth had stayed in such a relationship so long—a question Roth himself repeatedly posed in the book, finding no satisfactory answer. Both Hermione Lee and Jonathan Brent used the same phrase—“relentless self-justification”—to describe Roth’s tone, and privately Brent deplored the way Roth had been “washing these little gemstones of memory, over and over and over again, so they come out as set pieces.” Barbara Sproul, who loved him, was “saddened by the obsessiveness of it . . . that perpetual desire to be understood and to be justified”—still, still—and insisted on talking him out of it in person. As Roth recalled their conversation, she said, “ ‘You’re gonna do yourself more damage with this book than she did with hers.’ I said, ‘It’s the truth!’ And she said, ‘You’re gonna look like a bully.’ . . . I said, ‘I didn’t start it!’ And she just said, ‘Don’t do it.’ ” After she left, it occurred to Roth that the only person who might have encouraged him was Ross Miller. “Let’s just forget it,” he told Wylie over the phone, deciding to use the manuscript in the sense implied by its title.