EPILOGUE
ROTH’S IMPRESSIVE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY WAS above the fold on the front page, and he got even bigger star treatment in France: “PHILIP ROTH: Mort d’un géant” read the headline in Le Monde. He would have been pleased, too, with his ninety-year-old colleague Cynthia Ozick’s witty swat at the Swedish Academy in The Wall Street Journal: “How should those obtuse northland jurors, denizens of a frost-bitten society highly ranked for alcoholism and suicide, warm to the emotional temperature of the postwar Jewish Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, N. J., out of which the grandson of immigrants might emerge to become one of the most renowned American literary masters of his century?” The BBC agreed, hailing Roth as “arguably the best writer not to have won the Nobel Prize since Tolstoy.”
The stark simplicity of a particular Nobel laureate’s gravestone—Camus’s, with its roughly carved name and years—was the kind of thing Roth wanted for himself. (“So it will just say your name on it?” Halliday asked. “No,” said Roth. “It will say Camus’s name on it.”) Roth entrusted the job of finding and inscribing a proper gravestone to his caretaker in Connecticut, Russ Murdock, a stonemason. (“Hey!” Roth had yelled from his bedroom window one day, while Murdock was repairing one of his ancient stone walls. “I buried an ex-wife in that wall, just about where you’re at. If you dig her up, you put that bitch right back where you found her!”) Roth had wanted one of the moldy boulders strewn around his property, and after he left Warren that last time, Murdock found what struck him as the perfect specimen. Roth died before he could examine it firsthand, so Golier and Rogers visited the land and “went nuts” (Murdock) with enthusiasm.
One may find this singular marker at Bard College Cemetery, near the grave of Hannah Arendt. Roth had decided on this final resting place with his usual careful deliberation. Years before, while researching cemeteries for Sabbath’s Theater, he’d considered buying a plot for himself near his parents at Gomel Chesed, but the waggish warden had advised him against it (“not enough legroom”); also he’d considered Cornwall Cemetery in Litchfield County (where he’d buried Janet Hobhouse), professing to admire its “quiet neighbors” and “nice setback.” In the end, though, like Sabbath, Roth couldn’t imagine spending eternity among so many decorous, laconic goyim, so finally he called Leon Botstein, the Bard president, and asked whether he and Manea were planning their burials at the campus cemetery. They were. “We will never separate,” Manea had once told Roth, “because you are a sadist and I am a masochist.”
The funeral took place on Memorial Day. Eighty or so mourners—a diverse group including bookseller Enrico Adelman, Jonathan Brent, Don DeLillo, Deborah Eisenberg, Nathan Englander, David Remnick, the actor Wallace Shawn, and Roth’s devoted Manhattan cleaner, Estele Solano (whom he’d recently given $70,000 to help her buy an apartment in Jackson Heights)—boarded two chartered buses outside Riverside Chapel, on the Upper West Side, and took the two-hour trip to Annandale-on-Hudson. Naturally Roth had insisted on a secular service, though Botstein—who was hosting the reception afterward—considered it seemly to say Kaddish; Roth’s old friend Marty Garbus, however, had an “imagined conversation” with Roth, who assured him he wanted nothing of the kind. Others agreed, and Botstein relented. Beneath a big tent in the wooded cemetery, Roth’s loved ones read aloud from his work: Golier’s fourteen-year-old son, William, read from The Great American Novel about the mystical perfection of the baseball diamond; his mother read the “great god of Loneliness” passage from American Pastoral (“Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper”); and finally, after several other readings, Mia Farrow intoned Roth’s last word of fiction—“invincible”—and Golier’s daughter, Amelia, with her violin teacher, Emily Kalish, played a Shostakovich duet. Each mourner then took a turn shoveling dirt into the grave, a haunting (and secular) aspect of the traditional Jewish funeral that Roth had allowed.
At the crowded and meticulously planned (by Roth) memorial at the New York Public Library, on September 25, Ben Taylor remarked in his eulogy that Roth “took a death-defying satisfaction in the vastness of what he’d wrought—a shelf of work augmenting the soul of the nation and built to outlast whatever unforeseeable chances and changes await us and our descendants.” One was reminded of Roth’s enduring relevance when, a month later, a man crazed with anti-Semitism (“all these Jews need to die”), and armed with an AR-15 and three handguns, slaughtered eleven worshippers during Shabbat services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The next day, amid added security, nine hundred people came to a previously scheduled reading of The Plot Against America at the 92nd Street Y. Michael Stuhlbarg was the first of nine actors to read (“Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear . . .”), while Jon Hamm waited his turn backstage: “When I read this book, I was like ‘When was this written? The parallels are right there.’ ” He sipped his coffee. “I think Roth died from grief.”
ROTH LAVISHLY ENDOWED an educational fund for Julia Golier’s children and gave large individual bequests to his closest friends; he also donated $1.6 million to the Guggenheim Foundation to support writing fellowships. But the lion’s share of his estate went to the Newark Public Library—an institution forever dear to his heart. On March 1, 1969, he’d published an indignant letter in the Times when the Newark City Council voted—eighteen months after the riots—to strike funding ($2.8 million) for the Newark Museum and Public Library: “It is strange (to put it politely) that now, when Newark is mostly black, the City Council (for fiscal reasons, we are told) has reached a decision that suggests that the books don’t really belong to the public after all, and that what a library provides for the young is no longer essential to an education.” What the library provides for at least half of its ten thousand weekly patrons, fifty years later, is a place where they can find help getting access to social services, or typing out job applications—a bastion for the poor, in short, more than ever, and hence still a target for budget cuts when times are bad (a third of its funding was cut during the 2008 recession).
Along with millions of dollars, Roth donated the four thousand books from his Connecticut house, to be kept in a special room designated the Philip Roth Personal Library Collection. Designed by the architect Ann Beha, the room will include a pair of Roth’s writing desks, his reading chairs, and his beloved refectory table from the Stone Room, the better for readers to experience his books (marked up with his underlinings and marginal glosses in many cases) as he did. “We think the Newark Public Library can now become an important literary destination for students and scholars and even for tourists,” said Rosemary Steinbaum, the library trustee who’d become Roth’s friend while working on his eightieth birthday exhibition. In 2016, when Roth announced his gift, the library kicked off a fund drive to raise another three million dollars, an important part of which is the annual Philip Roth Lecture. The inaugural speaker was the novelist Zadie Smith,* another late-life friend of Roth, who discussed his influence on her—especially via Portnoy’s Complaint—in a talk titled “The I Who Is Not Me”: “I know that I stole Portnoy’s liberties long ago. . . . He is part of the reason, when I write, that I do not try to create positive black role models for my black readers, and more generally have no interest in conjuring ideal humans for my readers to emulate.” “It is a splendid, quietly subversive, gesture by Mr. Roth,” The Economist noted of his library bequest; “a rich university would have paid handsomely for his books. It is also a reminder of how touchingly respectful of Newark, transformed though it has been by immigration, deindustrialization and riots, he always is.”
THE TRAUMA OF ROTH’S first marriage haunted him almost every day of his life. Toward the end, while putting himself to sleep with his nightly memory sessions, Roth came to the year 1964 and “a darkness invaded [his] mind”: “I was trying not to remember Maggie in it,” he realized. Shown long-lost photos of his 1959 wedding day, he became sick to his stomach. He was haunted, too, by the collateral damage. “I’d hate for you to see [Helen],” he said to Ross Miller, in 2004, of the woebegone stepdaughter he’d left behind. Roth took it for granted that, if Helen were still alive (which he doubted), her life was squalid and she’d be apt to say bitter things about him. “It breaks my heart to think of her,” he went on, murmuring “Maggie picking up that bicycle pump—going after [Ronald]—I was in the wrong world—she was a criminal.”
As it happened, Roth had been right when he wrote Solotaroff, in 1962, when Helen was a barely literate waif of eleven, “[She] changes daily under our eyes; she is blessed with deep self-preserving instincts and who knows, but they may get her through, and may even make of her something special.” And lo, it came to pass: Helen reported, in 2013, that she was the mother of “two very accomplished adult children” and had been happily married for over thirty years to the cofounder of a multimillion-dollar company in the Bay Area. “I will always walk emotionally with a limp,” she said, “but most people do. I insisted on surviving.” One step in the process was distancing herself from her father, Burt, who was pleased to mention that the last time he’d seen her, in the late eighties, she’d just read a magazine excerpt from The Facts and was conspicuously disgruntled with her former stepfather. Told that Helen was alive and well, and moreover resented him for his “mean-spirited” and “distorted” portrayal of Maggie in The Facts, Roth replied: “Not even [Helen], who suffered terribly at her parents’ hands, knows the depths of her mother’s evil—and I know the meaning of the word—because she was only a child and a wayward adolescent when all this was happening to her and because, miraculously, she somehow saved herself”; her brother, Ronald, however, is “not so generous about his mother,” Roth pointed out, “because his life was fucking blighted by her and, unlike [Helen], his life was shit forever after.”
By Ronald’s own account, this is true. “I’ve been a very arrogant asshole most of my life,” he admitted, summing up. “A drunkard somewhat . . . bouncing around from job to job, moving all over the country, riding motorcycles now, fucking women I picked up.” He laughed. “I imagine my life was more like Red”—his errant grandfather, the model for Whitey Nelson in When She Was Good—“than anybody else.” Ronald candidly wonders whether he’s a sociopath, unable to attach himself to others, a tendency he attributes (along with his misogyny: women, he said, “are lying, conniving little manipulators”) to his mother’s influence.†
But Helen, over the years, steadily refused to feel bitterness toward Maggie, who, she liked to think, had done her best with a bad hand in life. When Helen first read about the urine ruse in The Facts, she considered it a “ridiculous” fabrication on Roth’s part; twenty-five years later, however, when presented with evidence to the contrary, her defense collapsed immediately. “Aren’t I lucky that I get to have these horrible fucking parents?” she said of Maggie and Burt. “I have a stepfather that wants nothing to do with me [because] I’m so inseparable from this crazy woman. I’m the one who lives without.” Whatever her occasional resentment, Helen always kept a photograph of Roth on her dresser—a bespectacled young man with a protective arm around his shyly delighted stepdaughter—and was devastated to learn of his death. As for Ronald, he laughed at the very idea Roth would ever want to see him again. “He was good to me, and I’m doing this interview as a tribute to Philip,” he told me. “I wish we were able to pick up the phone and call each other now and then, and I could ask him: ‘What the fuck were you doing with my mother anyway?’ ”
ON AUGUST 1, 2013, Roth wrote me one of his many apologias on these matters: “There’s a wise observation in Erik Erikson’s book Young Man Luther that I’ve never forgotten, for reasons that are all too obvious.
“The crisis in a young man’s life comes when he half-realizes that he is hopelessly overcommitted to what he is not.” . . . Overcommitment for a writer is the name of the game. There’s no other way to persevere up against the obstacle that writing fiction presents. Is. At least for someone like me. The intensity, the intensity—it kills you and it makes you all at once. . . . I didn’t know how to disengage from whatever, mistakenly, when not disastrously as well, I took-take to be a responsibility. Alas, without that driving me I might never have become a writer of any worth let alone the chump, the patsy, the sucker, the walking bull’s eye who married Maggie or who foolishly provided CB [Bloom] with everything she did nothing to deserve. Her financial losses, her never-satisfactory career, her fading reputation, her sickening household melodrama, the daily abasement before a bully of a daughter, her terror of life and fear of people, her delusions, her hatred of Jews and Connecticut and my parents, the racing panic that substituted for thinking, her submissive friendship with that emaciated pointed stick of Literary Envy and Free-Floating Malice, Francine du Plissitas—none of it was any of my business anymore than were Maggie’s jailbird father or her two helpless abandoned children or her dopey ex-husband, that poor bastard. That was her life, not mine—and yet, with just a snap of the fingers, a little fake urine pissed into an empty herring jar in a tenement hallway by a pregnant black woman for which Maggie paid two dollars (or was it three?), it became mine.
Roth never quite got over these mistakes; they went round and round and round in his head. Perhaps it was some little comfort knowing his second wife was similarly afflicted. “She loves him and she hates him,” said David Plante, who miraculously managed to stay friends with both. “In public she’ll say Richard Burton was the most important person in her life. It’s Philip; she knows that.” Francine du Plessix Gray adamantly shook her head at the word “hates”: “I think it’s much more sorrow.” But Gaia Servadio insisted “hates” is the mot juste: “I forbid her to mention Philip,” she said, “because every five words it’s ‘Philip. Bastard. . . . May he burn in hell.’ ” As for Bloom herself, she tends to wax pious, at least when speaking on the record: “I got many wonderful things from it,” she said of her marriage to Roth, in a representative interview. “I heard about him saying recently he’d retired from writing. Very sad. He said: ‘I’ve done the best with what I had.’ I thought that was very touching.”
By the time Roth died, it’s possible she’d mastered the worst of her ambivalence and become the high-minded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (or CBE, an honor conferred in 2013) for whom the purest feelings alone remain. When Roth was in extremis, Marty Garbus took it upon himself to phone Bloom lest the media beat him to it. “She seemed to muffle a cry,” he said of her reaction; during the long talk that followed, he suspected she wanted to ask whether Roth ever spoke lovingly of her. Afterward she inquired via email if Roth would have a Jewish funeral, and asked Garbus to include in his prayers a message that she loved him; she hoped Philip had found peace, what with his being “so afraid of dying.” Meanwhile she appeared on BBC Newsnight looking mournful but well preserved. “You wrote with anger, Claire,” presenter Emily Maitlis reminded her, and Bloom retorted that she “also wrote about our love, and people seem not to want to see that. . . . I remember him in the country, and we used to go for walks. I remember the joyful, wonderful times.” Roth, however, tended to dwell on the other times. “Your job at my memorial is to make sure Claire doesn’t show up,” he instructed Russ Murdock, his faithful caretaker and stonemason.
ROTH CONCLUDED HIS 2013 apologia thus: “High-powered people have a tendency to get carried away, to be sure, but twice in life, catastrophically, at the beginning and nearly approaching the end—as though I had learned NOTHING—I put the high-poweredness to the worst possible use. I didn’t flee to Bora-Bora—not me! But then, 31 times I put it to a proper use, to the only use that was of any use to me and I (me?) to it, if that or anything here makes sense.”
It makes sense. Roth’s thirty-one books, his fifty-five years of intensity, leave an achievement that, as Jonathan Lethem put it, “encompasses and transcends modes of historical fiction, metafiction, memoir, the maximalist (or putters-in), the minimalist (or takers-out), the picaresque and counterfactual, etcetera and so forth—being the sort of writer who in his generosity half blots out the sky of possibility for those who come along after—to generate in his ambitious followers a sort of army of Counter-Roths.” Indeed, how does one trace the influence of such a protean writer? Roth saw the problem. One day he told Plante he could parody the latter’s writing, and instantly gave an example: “He sat on a train. The train started. His ankle was itchy. The train slowed down. He scratched his ankle. The train stopped.” Then he challenged Plante to return the favor, but Plante was at a loss; Roth tried, but he couldn’t do it either. “That may be a bad sign,” he said.
And what about the protean man himself? In Deception, “Philip” imagines the predicament of Zuckerman’s hapless biographer: “He’s found a tremendous lack of objectivity in people’s responses to Zuckerman. Everybody gives him a different story. . . . What interests him is the terrible ambiguity of the ‘I,’ the way a writer makes a myth of himself and particularly, why.” Roth (the real one) thought a key phrase here would serve as a good title for his own biography—“THE TERRIBLE AMBIGUITY OF THE ‘I,’ ” he typed it out for me, “The Life and Work of Philip Roth”—“given its applicability,” he explained, “to the writer as imaginer and the characters whose being he imagines, men like Swede Levov, Ira Ringold, Coleman Silk, Mickey Sabbath, David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol, even benighted Portnoy.”
What Roth’s farrago of alter egos (especially the ones who write) have in common is a nature divided along somewhat predictable lines: the isolato who lives to pursue his art; the impious libertine who endeavors to squeeze the Nice Jewish Boy out of himself “drop by drop”; and of course the Nice Jewish Boy per se, wishing mostly to be good and pining for le vrai: “There was nothing that could ever equal coming home through the snow in late afternoon from Chancellor Avenue School. That was the best life had to offer. Snow was childhood, protected, carefree, loved, obedient.” Given the vastly different needs of his different selves, Roth’s engagement with the world was bound to be incomplete, when it wasn’t positively disastrous.
“Love!” he said, when an interviewer asked him about it; he pondered a moment, then burst into song à la Chaplin in Limelight:
. . . It’s love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love. It’s love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love. It’s love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love. It’s love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love. Love, love.
“You didn’t figure on getting that, did you?” he said, and laughed.