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Roth’s evolution as a writer was astounding in its versatility: after the deft satire of his early stories in Goodbye, Columbus, he went on to write two somber realistic novels (Letting Go, When She Was Good) whose main influences were Henry James and Flaubert respectively—an odd apprenticeship, given the outlandish farce of the Portnoy era that followed (Our Gang, The Great American Novel), the Kafkaesque surrealism of The Breast, the comic virtuosity of the Zuckerman sequence (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy), the elaborate metafictional artifice of
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“I am not ‘Alexander Portnoy’ any more than I am the ‘Philip Roth’ of Claire [Bloom]’s book,” he brooded over the actress’s scurrilous 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House.
Certainly this is how Roth was portrayed in Janet Hobhouse’s posthumous roman à clef, The Furies, whose characters include a famous writer named Jack modeled on Roth.
In fact he was often intensely engaged with the world, repeatedly traveling to Prague in the seventies and befriending dissident writers such as Milan Kundera and Ludvík Vaculík, whose books he promoted in the West with the Writers from the Other Europe series he edited at Penguin for many years.
But the better part of his career was quite as Hobhouse described it: the daylight hours doggedly spent at his desk, and nights in the company of a woman—both of them reading, if Roth had his way. “What should I have been doing instead so as not to be labeled a recluse,” he remarked, “passing my nights at Elaine’s?”
After his American Trilogy—what some called his “Letter to Stockholm” series—a consensus formed that Roth stood alone among contemporary novelists. Stockholm, however, remained unmoved. “The child in me is delighted,” Bellow had said about awards in general and the Nobel in particular; “the adult in me is skeptical.” Roth appropriated the remark for his own boilerplate, and meanwhile he couldn’t help thinking about the most conspicuous difference in his and Bellow’s respective careers—especially after Bellow’s widow gave Roth the top hat her husband had worn in Stockholm, which Roth displayed
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As for the remaining Jews of Galicia, almost every one of them would perish in the Holocaust—a catastrophe predicted as early as 1923 by the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, a Bialy Kamien–born Zionist who considered mass extermination the “tragic but almost inevitable outcome of Jewish indifference to their destiny.”
He wrote, for example, about the time the six-year-old Philip threatened to run away from home, whereupon his mother packed a little bag and put the boy outside the back door, where he stood on a dreary interior landing lit by a
There was the constant cake-making—marble, banana, angel food, chocolate layer, on and on—and at least two meals a day that included lunch, for which her sons were expected to come home even in high school, when Sandy, at least, would have preferred grabbing a sandwich at the coffee shop with the other “hip” kids; Bess, however, wouldn’t hear of it, and for the same reason as Mrs. Portnoy’s (“how do you think Melvin Weiner gave himself colitis? . . . Because he eats chazerai [garbage, pig food]!”). Dinner always included a cheap but tasty cut of meat, maybe a tongue or brust hammered into
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Anti-Semitic demagoguery flourished during the thirties. The German American Bund marched in New York wearing Nazi uniforms and waving swastika flags along with the Stars and Stripes. At a 1939 Bund rally in Madison Square Garden—as well attended as the Jewish anti-Nazi protest six years before—Bund leader Fritz Julius Kuhn railed against “Frank D. Rosenfeld” and his “Jew Deal,” which he characterized as a Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy.
fascist priest Father Coughlin
THE “LONGEST, SADDEST DAY of my young American life,” said Roth, was April 12, 1945, when FDR died of a cerebral hemorrhage just as the war in Europe was coming to an end. Roth was among the crowd in downtown Newark who stood, bereft, as the funeral train “passed with lumbering solemnity” during its trip from Washington to Hyde Park. When V-E Day came less than a month later, the Roth family sat around the radio listening to Norman Corwin’s long demotic masterwork, On a Note of Triumph, whose opening lines were fixed in Roth’s mind for all time:
seemed, would evaporate in view of this great collective struggle. And
was mentally disabled. During their occasional visits to Weequahic,
That spring Ethel was terminally ill with cancer of the tongue that had spread to the throat and lymph nodes. She needed round-the-clock care, but her husband was busy tending his shop, and their children had special needs of their own. Bess offered to take care of Ethel as long as it took.
The highlight of Roth’s undergraduate career was “The Seminar”—Martin’s two-semester, invitation-only honors course that covered the entirety of English literature “from its beginnings to the present,” or from Beowulf to Stephen Spender, as things stood then. For nine credit hours per semester (the equivalent of three regular courses) the workload was immense: Students had to read one or two books a week, as well as fifty pages in Albert Baugh’s Literary History of England, an underlined copy of which Roth would forever keep on the library table of his Connecticut living room.
Perhaps the most important aesthetic lesson of Roth’s youth, via readings of The Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn, was “the power of a voice”—now if only he could find a voice that sounded more like his own. Crucially, around the time he worried about giving up on himself, he discovered The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and was struck by a “kind of high-faluting [sic] conversational tone I like,” and also by Saul Bellow’s willingness to indulge in sprawling narrative abundance, not at all constrained by Neo-Aristotelian concerns with form and structure.
but, as Roth liked to say, “where Wolfe was merely a half-genius with the limitations of a half-genius, Bellow was a complete genius without any limitations I could see.” For Roth, the only twentieth-century American writer of comparable stature was Faulkner.
A low point of each week was the staff meeting, where Roth would vie with other egos in trying to spice up the syllabus with a little Orwell, or tweak the weekly lesson plan in otherwise interesting ways. The head of the composition faculty was a Tolstoy scholar named Ed Wasiolek, whom Roth would skewer in Letting Go as the pompous Spigliano: “As it were, my ass,” the narrator reflects, apropos of Spigliano’s remark that they should point out to students “how Gibbon impresses upon the reader the geography of the event with the geography, as it were, of the prose.”
While the anonymous author sat in back of the class, discreetly silent, the twenty or so students discussed the story a little severely until Bellow took his turn—a cherished moment preserved in The Ghost Writer, where Bellow appears in the thin disguise of Felix Abravanel, who defends Nathan Zuckerman’s story (“largely with his laugh”) against the “orthodox Forsterites” who think its characters lack the “round” quality prescribed by Aspects of the Novel.
Maggie seemed so keen on controlling things. Diane made a point of avoiding the Social Sciences secretary thereafter, but was left with “the distinct impression that Maggie was determined to marry Philip Roth. . . . She wasn’t good-looking, she didn’t strike one as intellectually ambitious, but she certainly was one of the most determined people I ever met.”
Along with Wilt’s class on Henry James (“Just now I put down Portrait of A Lady, and wonder what my writing efforts will ever amount to next to that”), he took Contemporary Criticism and Anglo-Saxon, the last of which he particularly loathed.
“I wanted to be morally serious like Joseph Conrad. I wanted to exhibit my dark knowledge like Faulkner. I wanted to be deep like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write literature. Instead I took Dick’s advice and wrote Goodbye, Columbus.”
More impressive even than the literary luminaries at Plimpton’s party, to Roth, were the gorgeous young women he longed to flirt with, if not for Maggie’s hawkish eye. Making matters worse, her Esquire job had ended without any prospect of another, and she was having trouble making rent on her “awfully small, awfully over priced apartment” on West Thirteenth. Roth’s stature in the literary world—soon to explode with Goodbye, Columbus—seemed especially to threaten her.
MacKenzie asked Roth for permission to give his phone number to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and on April 10 they got in touch (“Oh to be a liberal now that spring is here,” said Roth), inviting him to meet with two ADL representatives for lunch. When the day came, Roth was relieved to find himself with sympathetic fellows who only wanted to make him aware of certain complaints and answer whatever questions he might have. Roth told them how bewildering it was to be accused of anti-Semitism, all the more given his youthful ambition to study law and defend the rights of Jews,
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Irving Howe, the consummate New York intellectual, gave a somewhat more grudging appraisal in The New Republic: “Mr. Roth’s stories do not yield pleasure as much as produce a squirm of recognition: surely, one feels, not all of American Jewish life is like this, but all too much of it is becoming so.”
Another notable aspect of “Eli” is the potent way its hero embodies a theme reflected in the other stories, too, and throughout the work that would follow: the individual in revolt against the community, the I against the They—the refractory author’s persistent mulling of Kafka’s pensée “In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.”
“Hey, Mike,” said Roth, during a break, “you want to go after me or you want to talk to me?” The former, apparently; when it was over, though, Wallace gave Roth an amiable smile and complimented him on “being [his] own man.”
Then and later, Roth liked to teach books in tandem, the better to demonstrate the different ways authors approach similar themes in terms of craft and moral point of view: Bowen’s Death of the Heart and Golding’s Lord of the Flies; Bellow’s The Victim and Malamud’s The Assistant. At Iowa, too, he made things easier for himself by assigning each student to teach at least one novel on the syllabus (an idea he might have retained from his bravura lecture on Mario and the Magician for Willard Smith’s class at Bucknell), which forced them to study the book intensively as well as work on their
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Nobel Prize,”
That spring Maggie and he slept in separate bedrooms, and Roth began having an affair with one of his students—an attractive, talented twenty-two-year-old, Lucy Warner.
“The Needs and Images of Man,” devoted to exploring the state of Catholic-Jewish relations (four years, that is, before the Vatican Council finally absolved Jews for their part in killing Christ).
LOOKING BACK, LUCY WARNER FOUND IT HARD TO believe that she’d ever seriously considered Roth’s proposal to run away to her family house in Maine. Her mother was there, for one thing, and the woman had taken a very dim view of Lucy’s hasty marriage and divorce the year before. Still, despite an almost abject wish to regain her mother’s approval, Warner might have run away with Roth to somewhere if he hadn’t expressed a curious concern about becoming too attracted to his stepdaughter as “she got a little older.” “That was an alarm bell for me,” Warner remembered.
