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For Robert Pierpont
I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?
—Nathan Zuckerman, 1981, Zuckerman Unbound, quoting Franz Kafka, 1904, letter to Oskar Pollak
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Defenders of the Faith
Real Americans
Not Letting Go
A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis
A Jewish Joke
Drilling for Inspiration
Kafka’s Children
And Then He Sends Me Claire
The Madness of Art
Eating Only Words
Cain to Your Abel, Esau to Your Jacob
You Mustn’t Forget Anything
A Holiday About Snow
Nobody Beloved Gets Out Alive
America Amok
Betrayal
The Fantasy of Purity Is Appalling
The Breasts
Look Homeward, Angel
Ghosts
Forging Ahead
You Never Got Me Down
Afterthoughts, Memories, and Discoveries: At It Again
Acknowledgments
Works by Philip Roth
Index
Also by Claudia Roth Pierpont
Copyright
Introduction
I was leaving a crowded birthday party, in December 2002, when the host stopped me at the door and said that if I stayed he would introduce me to Philip Roth, whose work he knew I admired. The party was in a jazz club downtown—the thoughtful host and honoree was the jazz critic Stanley Crouch—and Roth was seated at the bar, surrounded by people. With courage kindled by Stanley and a couple of beers, I went up to him and blurted out that I thought he was one of the great American novelists of the twentieth century. He smiled and said, “But it’s the twenty-first century.” Then he turned to Stanley, beside me, and said, “You bring me these women and they insult me!” We laughed and I said a few more things that I hoped were less embarrassing. And then I left. Roth has no recollection that this ever happened.
Almost two years later, I received an envelope in the mail with the name Philip Roth and a Connecticut address stamped in the upper-left-hand corner. Inside was a brief, typed letter on plain white paper, explaining the context of a photocopy also enclosed. Roth was writing in response to an article I had written in The New Yorker about the anthropologist Franz Boas, whose life’s work touched on some of the issues raised in Roth’s most recent book, The Plot Against America: the dangers posed by the American Right during the thirties and early forties and the battle against isolationism and bigotry, to state these issues very broadly and in terms that Roth did not use in the letter at all. The photocopy was of the front page of a long-forgotten newspaper called In fact—“edited by George Seldes, a left-wing maverick of sorts,” Roth explained—dated November 17, 1941. Someone had sent it to him because it featured an article about Charles Lindbergh, who, in Roth’s counterhistorical novel, is elected to the American presidency. Roth was sending it to me because it also featured an article by Boas, and he thought that it might be of interest. He mentioned that his father used to get In fact and also I. F. Stone’s Weekly: “Papers to stoke the indignation.”
Readers of this book will learn that Roth not infrequently sends this sort of letter to people who have written something that piques his interest. I replied and he replied and we ended up meeting for coffee in New York City. My nervousness fell away immediately. Roth is a brilliant talker, but he also loves to listen: he’s as funny as you might think from his books, but he makes people around him feel funny, too—he may be the easiest laugher I’ve ever met. This turned out to be the first of many such meetings and discussions.
I am a journalist by profession but an art historian by training—half a lifetime ago, I wrote a dissertation in Italian Renaissance art history and spent long hours in European archives, searching for a single line that might add a scrap of knowledge or a shade of meaning to beloved subjects that had already been thoroughly researched. The smallest discovery was exciting: it felt like being in touch with history and with the world’s great artists; it felt like tugging back the curtain of time a fraction of an inch. And so, despite the easy camaraderie that Roth has inspired through roughly eight years of discussing books and politics and a thousand other things, it was not lost on me for a moment that being able to talk with Philip Roth about his work was an extraordinary privilege. On this subject, at least, I tried to keep track of everything he said.
I did not have this book in mind; I didn’t have anything particular in mind. I reviewed one of Roth’s books for The New Yorker and eventually became one of several readers to whom he showed his new work before publication. (The first time he asked me to read a manuscript, I said, “I’d be honored.” He replied, “Don’t be honored, or you’ll be no good to me.”) This book began, in 2011, as an essay that was meant to be part of a collection on American subjects. But it kept growing, for two reasons principally: Roth has written so many books; and he was willing to talk with me about them, at length.
Roth Unbound is fundamentally an examination of Roth’s development as a writer, considering his themes, his thoughts, and his language. By necessity, it covers an enormous span, from his Newark childhood, during the Second World War, and the wholly unexpected outrage that greeted his early short stories, through the literary (and unliterary) explosion of Portnoy’s Complaint; from the self-renewal of his experiences in Prague in the seventies and the imaginative fulfillment of The Ghost Writer to the series of masterworks published between the mid-eighties and the year 2000—The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral, The Human Stain—and, finally, to his short, intense novels of the twenty-first century. Of course, this summary barely touches on the high points of a career that has spanned more than fifty years and many different phases. In 2006, when The New York Times Book Review conducted a poll among contemporary writers, editors, and critics to determine “the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years,” a Roth novel did not come in first only because the votes for his work were split among seven different books. Not since Henry James, it seems to me, has an American novelist worked at such a sustained pitch of concentration and achievement, book after book after book. And then there are the subjects: Jews in America, Jews in history, sex and love and sex without love, the need to find meaning in one’s life, the need to change one’s life, parents and children, the trap of self and the trap of conscience, American ideals, the American betrayal of American ideals, the upheavals of the sixties, the Nixon presidency, the Clinton era, Israel, the mysteries of identity, the human body in its beauty, the human body in its corrupting illness, the ravages of old age, the coming of death, the power and failings of memory. It’s a wonder this book isn’t a lot longer.
Roth finished Nemesis in the fall of 2009, and he soon realized, even if the public did not, that it would be his last novel. A literary study like this could only have been written since then, with the full arc of Roth’s work completed. But Roth’s retirement is also a precondition for the somewhat hybrid form this book has taken,
because of his own considerable contributions to its pages: memories, observations, opinions, thoughts and second thoughts, jokes, stories, even songs. Unless another source is noted, all quotations in the following pages are derived from my conversations with him. (Likewise, the remarks of various friends come from my interviews and conversations with them.) To put it simply, he had the time to talk about his work because he wasn’t doing it anymore. And it was exciting to him to look back on a lifetime’s production that even he had not yet had time to sum up, beyond citing his heavyweight hero, Joe Louis, on retiring: “I did all I could with what I had.”
Roth has been extremely generous. He has answered many, many questions. He has let me prowl through the files in his attic in Connecticut. I have talked to him long enough, and through sufficiently different circumstances—in sickness and in health, literally—to hear changes in opinion, and I have tried to account for these changes, too, aware of the hazards of setting down a passing thought as the permanent record. And he has done all of this with the understanding that he would read not a single word in advance of publication. For one thing, he is beyond caring very much what people say anymore; he’s had an earful. For another, he knows better than anyone that freedom is as essential to writing as to life. And so, while this book has benefited beyond measure from Roth’s presence, I have kept him resolutely out of mind when it comes to my critical task.
I should add that, despite my middle name, I am not related to my celebrated subject. Once, it’s true, when we were both at dinner with a group of friends, someone asked about a possible familial connection, and Roth turned to me with a look of mild horror and wary recognition: “Did I use to be married to you?!” Fortunately, a moment of reflection proved that this was not the case.
In Zuckerman Unbound, Roth makes a distinction between the unwritten world and the world that emerges from his typewriter—as opposed to the real and fictional worlds—and with a sense of weight rather more evenly distributed than is generally allowed. This book is about Roth’s written world, but it has not been possible to write about that world without also delving into the unwritten one—the life that has so often served the work. Biography is important to some periods more than to others and is used primarily as illumination. Yet, as Roth said in an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1981, “Art is life, too, you know. Solitude is life, meditation is life, pretending is life, supposition is life, contemplation is life, language is life.” This book, then, is about the life of Philip Roth’s art and, inevitably, the art of his life.
Defenders of the Faith
“What is being done to silence this man?” The question, posed by a prominent New York rabbi in a letter to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in 1959, conveyed the tone of a demand and continued with the hint of a solution: “Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.” The figure condemned to bloody justice was a little-known writer of short stories named Philip Roth, aged twenty-six. In Roth’s retellings of his first public battle, he tends to recall himself as even younger, as though trying to convey the vulnerability he felt when he was invited by his elders at the League to meet and discuss the problem. Back in his high school days, Roth had wanted to become a lawyer for this very organization, protecting American Jews from legal bias and discrimination—as he told two of its officers over lunch at Ratner’s, the Jewish restaurant on Second Avenue, where, he fondly recalls, “the waiter’s thumb was always in the soup.” He was clearly a serious young man, and the lunch turned out to be a friendly affair. There was no way that the League could have controlled what he wrote, of course, even had its members wished to try, which they did not. (“Free country, the U.S.A.,” Roth cheerily noted in an account of the incident decades later.) During the next few years, however, he spoke about his work at meetings sponsored by several Jewish organizations, where he was freely able to defend what the rabbi’s next letter, written directly to him, just as freely denounced as “such conceptions of Jews as ultimately led to the murder of six million in our time.”
One of Roth’s stories was about a thirteen-year-old Hebrew school student who threatens to jump from the roof of a synagogue unless the rabbi, the boy’s mother, and everyone else gathered in the street below kneel down and declare their faith in Jesus Christ. But this story, titled “The Conversion of the Jews,” was not the one that had outraged the rabbi. There was also a story titled “Epstein,” about a sixtyish married Jewish man whose wages of sin for a brief affair are, progressively, a humiliating rash and a heart attack. This one was not mentioned by the rabbi, either, although another rabbi was reported by The New York Times to have complained about Roth’s portrayal of a Jewish adulterer and other “lopsided schizophrenic personalities,” all of whom happened to be Jews. But were there any major characters in Roth’s stories who were not Jews? In the eerie fable “Eli, the Fanatic,” the irate citizens who want to evict a home for Jewish refugee children from an elite suburban town are not the town’s long-established Gentiles but its nouveau suburban Jews, who see the refugees as foreign, embarrassing, and a threat to their new American status—a threat precisely of the sort that the rabbis found in Roth.
The source of rabbinical wrath had appeared in The New Yorker in March 1959 and was titled “Defender of the Faith.” More than Roth’s other stories, it was intensely realistic and psychologically complex. (Roth today calls it “the first good thing I ever wrote.”) Set in an army camp in Missouri during the final months of the Second World War, it follows the moral and emotional progress of a fair-minded Jewish sergeant—a recently returned combat hero, numbed by all the ruin he’s seen—who is repeatedly cajoled by a Jewish draftee into granting favors on the basis of their religious bond. The claims of Jewish clannishness were always disturbing to Roth’s proudly American heroes: the Hebrew student in “The Conversion of the Jews” first gets into trouble by asking the rabbi how he can “call the Jews ‘The Chosen People’ if the Declaration of Independence claimed all men to be created equal.” “Defender of the Faith” deals head-on with this conflict of loyalties: the finagling young soldier, on the point of successfully evading service at the front, is finally punished by the sergeant, who, despite reserves of feeling for the younger man and the memories of family he has stirred, has him reassigned to face the same dangers as the other men. When the pair confront each other at the story’s end (“There’s no limit to your anti-Semitism,” the furious young man cries, “is there?”), the sergeant explains that he is looking out not for a particular people but for “all of us.” This is the faith that he unequivocally defends, without, however, losing sight of the other faith that he has relinquished for it.
It was the depiction of the weaselly, lying, nineteen-year-old Jewish soldier that caused the stir. Neither Roth’s conclusions, nor the controlling intelligence of the sergeant, nor, certainly, the story’s literary qualities had any impact on those who were outraged by the mere suggestion that such a person might exist. The most incendiary aspect of the story, however, was its publication in The New Yorker. Roth’s earlier work had appeared in such prestigious but little-read journals as the newly founded Paris Review and the largely Jewish-read Commentary, which had been established by the American Jewish Committee after the war. In fact, “your story—in Hebrew—in an Israeli magazine or newspaper,” the censorious rabbi wrote to Roth, “would have been judged exclusively from a literary point of view.” Here, however, in America, in a magazine widely esteemed in Gentile society, Roth’s best efforts amounted to nothing less than an act of “informing.”
Roth was genuinely stunned by the reaction: blindsided. On the morning that The New Yorker came out, he recalls, he had walked from his apartment on East Tenth Street to the newsstand on Fourteenth Street “about six times,” until the magazine finally appeared, and then he took it home and “read it over and over, and then I read it backwards and then I read it upside down—I wouldn’t let it out of my hands.” Letters started coming in just a couple of days later and soo
n turned into such a deluge that the editors developed a form letter to send in reply. The story was a clear departure for The New Yorker, which had previously published Jewish stories on the order of The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N by Leo Rosten, stories that Roth describes as being about “cute Jews.” (Alfred Kazin began his first review of Roth’s work with the statement “Several weeks ago I was awakened, while reading the New Yorker, by Philip Roth’s ‘Defender of the Faith.’”) But beyond literary circles, the response was evidence of the rawness of Jewish nerves, just fourteen years after the end of the war—with losses still being absorbed and the word “Holocaust” not yet adopted to describe them—and of the inability of many Jews to accept Roth’s revelation of what he called their “secret”: “that the perils of human nature afflict the members of our minority.”
The publication of five of Roth’s stories in book form, together with a novella, Goodbye, Columbus, took place in May 1959, just two months after The New Yorker hit the stands. Roth later reported that the slender volume was considered, in some circles, “my Mein Kampf.” The new novella, which gave the collection its title, fueled heightening charges of Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitism through the same material that made it irresistibly comic: its broadly vaudevillian treatment of the working-class Jews of Newark (“Shmutz he lives in and I shouldn’t worry,” Aunt Gladys worries) and, especially, its relentless skewering of the country club Jews of nearby but worlds-away Short Hills—a postwar suburban species still new to literature. After a brief drive up from Newark, where Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max spend steamy summer nights sitting in a dingy alley seeking a breeze, Neil Klugman, age twenty-three, arrives among sprinkled lawns, air-cooled rooms, and streets named for the colleges the local progeny attend. Neil, a somewhat defensive graduate of the Newark branch of Rutgers University, and a junior league if wised-up Gatsby, is in pursuit of a girl—a Radcliffe girl named Brenda Patimkin, home for the summer—whose fascination is inextricably bound to the careless self-possession that money breeds.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 1
