Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  Not merely outrage but open fear was evident in reactions like that of the Berlin-born Hebrew scholar Gershom Scholem, who had left Germany for Palestine in the twenties and now warned, in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, that Roth had written “the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying,” a work potentially more disastrous even than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that “the Jewish people are going to pay a price.” At home, a series of furious articles in Commentary included what Roth still calls “a complete and devastating attack on all my work” by his onetime supporter Irving Howe. In an article titled “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” published in 1972, Howe dismissed Portnoy’s Complaint as little more than “an assemblage of gags” and claimed that Roth had written nothing since Goodbye, Columbus to equal its literary interest, then went on to spend pages revoking his praise of that earlier work.

  The Patimkins, in particular, whom ten years earlier Howe had found “ferociously exact,” he now considered mere “lampoon or caricature.” Roth, depriving his characters of the historical context that might have made them understandable—“the fearful self-consciousness which the events of the mid–20th century thrust upon the Patimkins of this world”—had chosen, instead, to elicit disdain by putting their vulgarity on “blazing display.” Marie Syrkin, also writing in Commentary, added to Howe’s charges, claiming that Portnoy’s shiksa fixation plainly resurrected the stereotype of Jewish racial defiler that had been a prominent feature of Nazi propaganda and had come “straight out of the Goebbels-Streicher script.” Roth barely touched on the subject of the Holocaust, but few of his Jewish critics now saw his work in terms of anything else.

  And the uproar among the Unchosen readers of the book? And among those Jews who found comparisons to Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher somewhat far-fetched? Readers who were not frightened or shamed by Portnoy’s Complaint were thrilled by its support for various private overthrowings of their own. In 1969, you didn’t have to be Jewish (or a man) to empathize with Portnoy’s (unspoken) rebuke of his mother: “Where did you get the idea that the most wonderful thing I could be in life was obedient? A little gentleman? Of all the aspirations for a creature of lusts and desires!” Or with his argument that, at thirty-three, his unmarried status reflects not an affliction (“So what’s the crime? Sexual freedom? In this day and age?”) but a willingness to face the truth about marital bonds:

  I simply cannot, I simply will not, enter into a contract to sleep with just one woman for the rest of my days. Imagine it: suppose I were to go ahead and marry A, with her sweet tits and so on, what will happen when B appears, whose are even sweeter—or, at any rate, newer?… How can I give up what I have never even had, for a girl, who delicious and provocative as once she may have been, will inevitably grow as familiar to me as a loaf of bread? For love? What love? Is that what binds all those couples we know together—the ones who even bother to let themselves be bound? Isn’t it something more like weakness? Isn’t it rather convenience and apathy and guilt? Isn’t it rather fear and exhaustion and inertia, gutlessness plain and simple, far far more than that “love” that the marriage counselors and the songwriters and the psychotherapists are forever dreaming about? Please, let us not bullshit one another about “love” and its duration.

  Neither the social contract nor the marriage contract was about to be torn up, but by the late sixties, with some help from Roth, both were the worse for wear.

  Portnoy’s Complaint made Roth a rich man. In May 1968, he was in debt for eight thousand dollars: “I had been sitting in my room like in Solzhenitsyn’s cell,” he says, “doling out this money to Maggie and being angry.” Suddenly, in June, Maggie was dead, his book was finished, and a messenger had delivered a publisher’s check for a quarter of a million dollars. (Life magazine: “What’s the tip on a quarter of a million?”) He paid off his debts, he bought a car, he moved to a nice apartment on the East Side, and he took Ann Mudge on a first-class trip to Europe, sailing on the France. He hadn’t bought any clothes in years, so he had several suits made at one of the poshest tailors in London—Kilgour, French & Stanbury, on Savile Row. The experience wasn’t as unfamiliar as he’d expected. “It was like the Temple B’nai Jeshurun in there,” he assures me. “The cloth was like the Torah ark, and there was the silence and the light coming through the dirty windows, and all the tailors were Jews.” He had more bespoke suits made elsewhere. He propositioned the first attractive journalist who was sent to interview him. He hired a call girl, while Ann was off somewhere, for an hour in a London hotel. “I was dizzy,” he remembers, “dizzy with success and freedom and money.”

  He broke up with Ann as soon as they got back to New York that fall. Because he believed what he had written about marriage, because he had been so badly burned by Maggie, and because, after more than four years together, they had reached the point where marriage and children were the next expected step. (“She didn’t say, ‘Marry me,’ she didn’t have to say it, it was there in every moment.”) Life was too full of possibilities. Yet he was not the sexual madman that many people took him to be. “The book came out in February 1969, and I went up to Yaddo in March and stayed for several months,” he says in reply to a question about life after Portnoy. “That was my freedom.”

  True, but not the entire story. In December 1968, at a dinner party, he met a beautiful young woman named Barbara Sproul—a graduate student in the history of religion, twelve years his junior but “a grown-up” and “somebody who knows her mind,” he says—who quickly became his next romance. Sproul visited him at Yaddo in mid-March and again in late March. In mid-April, when Roth realized that he could not face returning to New York, Sproul found a house for them to rent together a couple of miles outside Woodstock, just across the valley from a cabin that she already rented for herself. He had hardly taken a break between one long-term love affair and the next. Once again, he was living a determinedly regular and orderly life—although no one wanted to believe it.

  He was a celebrity, and he became even more famous when the movie version of Goodbye, Columbus was released, just two months after the publication of Portnoy. What a doubleheader for the Jews! The movie was a huge success, and Roth believes that Ali MacGraw was marvelous as Brenda Patimkin, but that the mother—Mrs. Patimkin, played by Nan Martin—was shrill and overdone. Indeed, Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times, while highly favorable, took uneasy account of the difference between Roth’s “lightly sketched” subsidiary characters and the movie’s “overstuffed, blintz-shaped caricatures.” The scene of a wedding reception, in particular, was singled out as an example of “gross moviemaking,” and Roth unhappily recalls its “big chopped-liver sculpture, and people stuffing their faces, which I certainly didn’t have.” While still rather appreciating the film, as the best that has been made from his work, he notes, “A little shrillness goes a long way. As does a little Jewish vulgarity.”

  He was not merely famous, however, but notorious. The impact of the book, far beyond the sheltering walls of literature, is almost impossible to believe now. On April 1, 1969, the Times ran an editorial titled “Beyond the (Garbage) Pale,” which shared the page with equally authoritative statements on the Lindsay administration’s hospital reorganization bill and federal cuts in welfare spending. The editorial’s general concern was the plummeting of “standards of public decency” in unnamed works of theater and film. But it reserved special rancor for “one current best-seller hailed as a ‘masterpiece,’ which, wallowing in a self-indulgent public psychoanalysis, drowns its literary merits in revolting sex excesses.” (It seems almost too pat that Eisenhower’s funeral procession was the headline story of the day.) According to the Times, the courts had let down the American people by refusing to outlaw such “descents into degeneracy,” and the critics had suspended their judgment—indeed, the evidence was in plain sight on the other side of the page, which featured an enormous ad for the same bestseller, with quotes heralding “an American masterwork” (Life), “t
he most important book of my generation” (The Washington Post), “an autobiography of America” (The Village Voice), and—from The New York Times—“a brilliantly vivid reading experience” that was also “potentially monumental in effect.”

  On television, Jacqueline Susann, author of the scarcely stainless Valley of the Dolls, said on The Tonight Show that she would like to meet Philip Roth but wouldn’t want to shake his hand. Roth himself refused to appear on television, not wishing to make himself more recognizable than he already was: the book jacket had an author photograph on its back. People continually accosted him in the street, apparently convinced that they knew him intimately. (“Hey, Portnoy, leave it alone!”) This was why he left the city to hide out at Yaddo, pursued by competing rumors that he was dating Barbra Streisand and that he had been committed to a hospital for the insane.

  Unlike so many symbols of its era, Portnoy’s Complaint has survived: it shows signs of becoming a classic rather than a relic. There was a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Roth; a few years later, in 1997, Louis Menand, in The New Yorker, wrote, “Portnoy is forever.” And it remains remarkably controversial in an era when John Updike’s once scandalizing Couples has slipped into the realm of the comfortably historic, and Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?—another deliberately provocative and well-received sixties novel about the new America—has faded from sight. In 2009, on its fortieth anniversary, Portnoy was awarded an unofficial, retrospective Booker Prize, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, for the best novel of 1969. A dissenting judge on the jury, the English classicist Mary Beard, complained about the choice in a Times Literary Supplement blog, deriding the book as “literary torture” and a “repetitive, blokeish sexual fantasy.” She was met with a hail of reactions, pro and con, ranging from a heated defense of “the can’t-put-it-down vigour of Roth’s writing” to derisory comments about his “ethnic stereotypes” and the calmly universalizing assertion that “any man who’s grown up in an ethnic-immigrant household in America has his entire life story etched out in the pages of that book.” One person who hadn’t read it reported the decision to buy a copy right away: “There must be something about the book if it provokes such a range of comments.”

  Looking back, Roth wonders what might have happened had he not written Portnoy’s Complaint. He believes that it still determines his reputation, as a writer and as a man, in a diminishing as well as in a positive way. (In February 2013, Town & Country put Roth on its list of “Top 40 Bachelors”—at the age of seventy-nine—with a single comment: “The recently retired Pulitzer Prize winner has rarely met a shiksa he didn’t like.”) To Roth, the most important scene—“the pumping heart of the book”—was almost entirely overlooked and has nothing to do with masturbation. It is a seemingly peripheral scene that involves Alex’s Uncle Hymie getting rid of the shiksa cheerleader his son adores: the determined father secretly tells the girl that his son has an incurable disease and is under doctor’s orders never to marry, then slips her some cash in case she didn’t fully understand. When the son finds out, he and his father have a furious, physically violent face-off, in which the boy is wrestled to the floor and cruelly subdued. A few years later, when the son is killed in the war, the only consolation people can think to offer is that he didn’t leave behind a shiksa wife or goyische children. Roth’s point was the insularity and brutality of Jewish family life in those years: the whole-life demands, the mortal ruin that repaid transgression.

  Roth admits that he never actually saw such physical violence, although his father used to tell the story of his father having beaten up an older son to “save him” from marrying what Herman Roth called “a worldly woman.” The phrase, Roth explains, referred to an older woman, possibly a divorcée—not a shiksa—but he heard many stories about Jewish parents paying off Christian girls or sitting shivah for children who had married outside the faith, exactly as if those children were dead. This was the cultural background against which Portnoy’s Complaint was written, and Roth now suspects it was the aspect of the book that Jews found most upsetting, in its revelation of “Jewish rage, and in particular Jewish rage against the Gentiles.” It is also the cultural background from which the author came, although he has been tireless in stating that such brutality was entirely foreign to his family. For one thing, his parents had never objected to his dating—or marrying—anyone because she was not Jewish. For another, they were emphatically (how many times has he had to say this?) not the Portnoys.

  “A novel in the guise of a confession,” Roth wrote in 1974, in an essay titled “Imagining Jews,” “was received and judged by any number of readers as a confession in the guise of a novel.” The casually unliterary, first-person naturalness of Roth’s voice led many readers to imagine that Portnoy’s story was his own, despite his avowal that this naturalness was a hard-won technical achievement, something like the acting style of Marlon Brando. (Previous books in the “Jewish son” tradition may have helped to cloud the issue: the jacket of How to Be a Jewish Mother featured two photographs of the author, Dan Greenburg, being spoon-fed by his mother, one as a toddler and the other at what looked to be age thirty.) It’s true that the Portnoys have certain points of resemblance to Roth’s father and mother, as revealed in his later nonfiction: Jack Portnoy, like Herman Roth, is a hardworking insurance salesman without a high school education but with a substantial moralizing streak. Sophie Portnoy has Bess Roth’s aptitude for the housewifely arts and makes the same tomato soup when her son comes home for lunch. Portnoy also exploits some of the same incidents as Dr. Kleinschmidt’s article, including Sophie’s reply to eleven-year-old Alex’s request for a bathing suit with a jockstrap: “For your little thing?” Despite the cozy happiness that Roth recalls of his early years, it isn’t difficult to fathom why, in The Facts, he admits that his favorite word from childhood onward was “away.”

  But the Portnoys were not his parents. They had begun as neighboring relations, after all, and became parents only with the psychoanalytic setting: “You don’t lie on the couch and talk about your neighbors for five years,” Roth remarks. And it was his father, anyway, who drove him crazy; his father, not his mother, who was difficult and domineering, if also heartrendingly well-meaning. It was his father’s interference that he’d had to escape, all the way to Bucknell and Chicago. His mother was a reticent being by comparison, the family’s peacekeeper when the males went head-to-head. A lady, a meticulous writer of thank-you notes, a passionate admirer of Eleanor Roosevelt: a woman about whom Roth’s only real-life criticism is that she was at times “a little too comme il faut.” Roth has been explaining and defending her now for decades, and I am somewhat surprised one day when he mentions that his brother, Sandy, probably saw things differently.

  It is the summer of 2009, shortly after Sandy’s death, and Roth is musing about how differently the boys perceived their mother. Roth worshipped his big brother in his youth and maintained a steady relationship with him throughout their lives, but he believes that Sandy had probably disliked their mother ever since he came home from school, age five, to find her playing with a new baby. It’s also possible that she behaved differently with her firstborn: stricter, maybe, more frightened and hovering. In any case, Sandy, who failed to have the artistic career he wanted, blamed their mother for making him too closed and careful, too intimidated to succeed as an artist, and he continued blaming her, Roth says, until the day he died. It was Sandy’s relationship with their mother that Roth used as a model for Portnoy. If Roth himself felt any youthful ambivalence about her, any trace of anger that psychoanalysis may have stirred, it is long forgotten. He says that there is not a day that he doesn’t think of his mother or of something she said that seems to him wonderful. Not that she said anything exceptional. “It was just ordinary mothering,” he says, “quite wonderful enough.”

  Shortly before Portnoy’s Complaint was to be released, Roth warned his parents that they might be bothered by reporters. This was be
yond their comprehension, and his mother wept because she feared that he was deluded about the effect the book was going to have, and would be disappointed. Both his parents had always been proud of his work and couldn’t understand the charges it had drawn. When his father told the story of a neighbor that Roth turned into “Epstein,” about an aging adulterer who is caught more or less with his pants down, Roth says that he told it with the same wry sympathy that he himself tried to capture on the page. Who could think that this ordinary human stuff was racial calumny? Or anti-Semitic?

  Yet, as the tidal wave of reaction to Portnoy began to swell, Roth felt the need to get his parents out of harm’s way. He sent them on a cruise, first to London, where he had a friend look after them and show them around. (The friend happened to be Delmore Schwartz’s ex-wife, Gertrude Buckman, who found Herman Roth almost impossible to handle. “My father,” Roth cries rather proudly, “outdid Delmore Schwartz!”) After that, he sent them on their first visit to Israel. They were gone for a month, so, as he’d planned, they missed some of the early firestorm over the book. His father had taken along a supply of copies, though, and later recounted how on the ship he kept asking people, “You want an autographed copy of my son’s book?” Then he would go to his cabin, get a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint, and sign it himself: “From Philip Roth’s father, Herman Roth.”