Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  There is still a final turn of the marital screw. The epigraph to My Life as a Man is a line from Maureen Tarnopol’s diary, which is discovered, at a late stage in the novel, by her stunned and exhausted husband: “I could be his Muse, if only he’d let me.” She, who did everything she could to thwart him? To get in his way? The diary also contains a more detailed and confident statement of her literary value to him. “If it weren’t for me he’d still be hiding behind his Flaubert and wouldn’t know what real life was like if he fell over it,” she writes. “What did he ever think he was going to write about, knowing and believing nothing but what he read in books?” It’s a line of thinking that Roth picks up fourteen years later, when, in The Facts, he suggests that he stayed with Maggie as long as he did because she was “the greatest creative-writing teacher of them all, specialist par excellence in the aesthetics of extremist fiction.” Coming from him, the statement seems emotionally evasive and too clever by half, yet in a twisted way, made all too clear in this savage, funny, part-brilliant, part-strangled book, it is also very possibly true.

  Kafka’s Children

  “You must change your life.” Roth had been traveling, teaching, reading—doing everything he could to renew himself. Although he kept his apartment in New York, he was rarely there. He was no longer interested in what people called a social life. He was working steadily. None of the books he’d written since Portnoy had approached its success—My Life as a Man was a particularly dismal flop—and while this record wasn’t anything to be happy about, it was not the core of the problem. He knew very well who he wasn’t, even if that happened to be what thousands of people thought he was. “I am not a bum or a lecher or a gigolo,” Peter Tarnopol says to his psychiatrist, “or some kind of walking penis”—a message that had so far failed to reach Roth’s audience. But even the audience didn’t really matter. Finding out who he was, getting outside himself, understanding what was meaningful to him and doing something about it, in his life and his work: these were the somewhat blurry aims that came into focus almost as soon as he arrived in Prague.

  “I wanted to see Kafka’s city,” he says, “and accidentally I found something more important.” He was taking a trip, again with Barbara Sproul, as a reward for completing a long bout of work. Their plan was to see “the beautiful cities,” so they went to Venice (where he’d been before) and Vienna (where he went to Freud’s house and many museums) and then hired a car to drive them to Prague. It was the spring of 1972, almost four years since Soviet tanks had crushed the democratic hopes of the liberation movement known as the Prague Spring. During his first few hours of walking the city, Roth was captivated by its shabby, worn-down beauty, the big castle across the river, and the quiet, often empty streets. (“The only other tourists were a Bulgarian trade delegation.”) It was clear that “people were not happy,” he says, but he could tell at once that “there was something here for me.”

  He was not unaware of Czech political woes or their literary ramifications. Barbara Sproul was an active member of Amnesty International—“part of the vaguely missionary spirit that also drove her religious interests,” Roth says now—and, when not touring the city, she was visiting the families of people who had been jailed. Sproul tells me that it was lucky for her that the sexist Czech authorities did not take her seriously—“they thought I was just the bimbo.” Every day, “government agents would set off after Philip,” and she would be free for a few hours to follow her rounds. (By the mid-seventies, Sproul was Amnesty International’s Czech coordinator.) For Roth, a meeting with the editorial board of his Czech publishing house began to suggest at least a part of his own purpose there. At its conclusion, an editor who spoke fluent English asked him to join her for lunch. And the first thing she told him was that the other people he’d just met were “swine,” mere government lackeys who had been hired or promoted after the Soviet crackdown, when the original board members were fired. She offered to introduce him to the “real” literary Prague.

  They began by having dinner with his Czech translators, Rudolf and Luba Pilar, who were completing their work on Portnoy’s Complaint—even though the book was unpublishable in Czechoslovakia at the time. Many books, they explained, and many writers were unpublishable in Czechoslovakia. For the time being, Portnoy would appear in samizdat—a typed manuscript passed around in as many carbon copies as could be made. Despite the political and social hardships of their hosts’ situation, Roth recalls the evening as “hilarious.” The Pilars had been having special trouble with the book’s obscenities, and they spent a lot of time re-translating their Czech translations of the dirtiest bits into their own English, to determine if they’d got them right. (Barbara Sproul recalls one choice example, rendered as “He licked her pan.”) Hilarious, but also fascinating, upsetting, and exciting.

  Roth had always thrived on moral engagement, as a man and as a writer. From the boy in “The Conversion of the Jews” who challenges his rabbi on the subject of “The Chosen People,” and the heroes of Letting Go struggling with their sense of responsibility for others, to Alexander Portnoy locked in his internal struggle to be free of ethical imperatives, and even the vein-popping outrages of Trick E. Dixon: it’s the moral battle that these immensely varied works have in common. One might say that the moral battle was essential to Roth’s sense of being Jewish—the factor that made him declare, many times, that he was grateful to have been born a Jew. Historical weight, unjust opposition, burdens of conscience, looming threats of exposure and disaster, difficult claims of loyalty. What a subject for a writer to be born to! In truth, the heyday of the subject was more his parents’ era—there was some no-nonsense anti-Semitism—but even his father, after a lifetime on the bottom rungs of Metropolitan Life, had been promoted, in the fifties, to district manager of a swath of southern New Jersey, where he ran an office of some fifty people. God bless America. Yet here, as far from Newark as Roth could get, he found another living moral subject, complete with historical weight, threats of exposure, and difficult claims of loyalty. In Prague, he felt at home.

  The first trip was brief, but when he returned to New York he plunged into the subject: Czech history, Czech literature, Czech film. His friend Robert Silvers, the co-editor of The New York Review of Books, put him in touch with the Czech émigré journalist and film critic Antonín Liehm, who was teaching a course in Czech culture at Staten Island Community College. Roth took the ferry out there every week and got to know not only Liehm and his wife, Mira, a film historian, but various film directors who visited the class. He took the ferry back one day with Ivan Passer, after the class watched Intimate Lighting—“If Chekhov could have written and directed a movie, it would have been Intimate Lighting,” Roth says now—and he and Passer went on to dinner and what became a long, close friendship. (Passer later got Roth to write a screenplay of When She Was Good, hoping to direct it, but the project came to nothing.) He read whatever novels he could find in translation, and his life was more and more about things Czech: he often went to dinner at one of the Czech places over in Yorkville, where he met an ever-widening group of people. His fortieth birthday party, in March 1973, thrown for him by Barbara Sproul, was held at one of these restaurants, and photographs show a mix of guests from all phases of his life: the Liehms and other new Czech friends; Mildred Martin and Bob and Charlotte Maurer from Bucknell (Roth kept up with the teachers he admired throughout their lives); a visiting contingent of Chicago friends; New York editors; and, at the center of it all, his beaming parents.

  It was at this time that he wrote an extraordinary experiment of a story, which suggested the stirring of fresh impulses in his work. “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” was published in American Review in 1973 and republished two years later in Reading Myself and Others. Completed after he taught a Kafka class at the University of Pennsylvania the previous fall, and dedicated to “the students of English 275,” this quietly radical work begins not as a story but as an essay,
with Roth contemplating a photograph of Kafka taken in 1924, at the age of forty—exactly Roth’s age at the time, he notes, although it was the final year of Kafka’s life. Kafka died “too soon for the holocaust,” Roth writes, introducing the no longer new if not yet capitalized historical term into his prose. “Skulls chiseled like this one were shoveled by the thousands from the ovens; had he lived, his would have been among them, along with the skulls of his three younger sisters.”

  His life had been grim. In a few insightful if professorial pages, Roth traces Kafka’s troubles with his overbearing father, his difficulties with women, and the events of the year in which he finally succumbed to tuberculosis. Had he lived on, Roth notes, it is almost impossible to imagine Kafka—“so fascinated by entrapment”—immigrating to Palestine with his friend Max Brod or in any way escaping the most horrible of fates. And then Roth himself opens the trap and sets him free. Essay cedes to fiction, and suddenly it is 1942, and the fifty-nine-year-old Czech Jewish émigré to America, Dr. Franz Kafka, is the Hebrew teacher of nine-year-old Philip Roth, who, to the delight of the rest of his class, has dubbed the peculiar old man—with his German accent, his cough, his faintly sour breath—Dr. Kishka. But little Philip is not unkind. In fact, learning that his teacher lives alone, in a single room, he is fired by “redemptive fantasies of heroism” about those he has learned to call, in quotes, “the Jews of Europe.” He decides to intercede by talking to his parents: “I must save him. If not me, who?”

  And so Dr. Kafka is invited to the Roths’ for dinner, along with Philip’s Aunt Rhoda, a lively spinster with theatrical ambitions, whom Kafka is intended, Philip realizes with horror, “to marry.” To Philip’s amazement, Kafka takes Aunt Rhoda out on several dates, and she is so enlivened by his interest that she gets a leading role in the Newark Y’s production of Three Sisters. (In a fantasy within a fantasy—Roth today says he’s sure that “Kafka must have read Chekhov”—Kafka opens Rhoda’s eyes to the beauty of Chekhov’s play, reading it aloud to her all the way through. As we learned at the start of the essay, Kafka had lost three sisters.) Of course, even with the literary saint enmeshed—like the mythic Portnoys—in the details of Newark domesticity, there is only so far that Roth can take Kafka in this world. The romance fails because of an undetermined problem of a sexual nature or, as Philip’s father concedes, because Dr. Kafka is “meshugeh.”

  The story ends with a pair of painful transformations. Philip has become a college junior, staying on at school during summer vacation to write stories, but also because he cannot bear going home anymore. He cannot stop fighting with his father, and crying over the fights, because he is being crushed not by paternal criticism but by an overbearing and unbearable love. To his own dismay, both his parents—“they, who together cleared all obstructions from my path”—seem “now to be my final obstruction!” His mother, hurt and confused, continues to write letters, in one of which she encloses a local newspaper obituary, on which she has written: “Remember poor Kafka, Aunt Rhoda’s beau?” He reads: “a refugee from the Nazis,” “a Hebrew teacher,” “70 years old,” “no survivors.” And no books, he adds. “No Trial, no Castle, no Diaries.” Only a few “meshugeneh” letters to Aunt Rhoda, maybe still preserved with her collection of Broadway playbills. (“Meshugeh” versus “meshugeneh”: there are very few people left in the world who can calibrate the difference, and Roth is not among them.)

  The fate of Kafka the survivor isn’t a matter only of the exchange between fact and fiction, or between life and art, although these subjects will be crucial to Roth’s later work. The chill here comes with the confusion of power between life and art, between fact and fiction. At the story’s end, and about its end, Roth sensibly asks, “How could it be otherwise?” Kafka’s heroes do not reach the Castle, or escape the judgment of the Court. Kafka’s hunger artist, from whom Roth takes his title—the ultimate ascetic, who makes starvation an art—dies and is forgotten. Kafka himself had requested that his manuscripts be destroyed, unread. “No,” Roth concludes, “it simply is not in the cards for Kafka ever to become the Kafka.” His literary survival and magnitude are the impossible fate, which Kafka himself would have been the last to believe.

  This brilliant hybrid of a story was completed just before Roth’s second trip to Prague, with Barbara Sproul, in the spring of 1973. This time, he went prepared with a list of writers who had likewise been alerted about him. His closest contact and general guide there was the English-speaking Ivan Klíma—child survivor of the Terezín concentration camp, novelist and playwright, whose works had been banned and his passport confiscated by the Soviet-backed regime. Another immediate ally was Milan Kundera, who spoke little English yet impressed Roth as an intensely magnetic figure: “a combination of a prizefighter and a panther.” Roth had read two of Kundera’s books—Laughable Loves and The Joke—in their tiny English editions, and he and Kundera were soon having long conversations, three or four hours at a time, via the translating services of Kundera’s wife, Vera. “By the time it was over Vera looked like she’d had sex with both of us,” Roth remembers with a laugh, “pale, her hair all over her face, and very excited from the conversation.” Kundera’s books, too, were banned in his homeland, as were the works of other writers and translators Roth met—Ludvík Vaculík, Miroslav Holub, Rita Klímová. Sproul remembers that a number of Czech writers were infatuated with the subject of American cowboys and Indians and, in particular, that Vaculík challenged Roth to see who could list more Indian tribes. Roth quickly fell behind and was caught out improvising tribes like “the Kreplach.”

  Sproul also recalls the feeling of “responsibility” these trips gave both of them—“as Americans, we had all this privilege, all this power, and what were we doing with it?” Cut off from foreign royalty payments and denied any form of intellectual work, the best of literary Prague, true heirs of Kafka, were sweeping streets or working at other menial jobs to earn a living. On leaving the city this time, Roth asked Klíma, “What do you people need?” (One can hear the echo of young Philip in Roth’s Kafka story: “If not me, who?”) And the answer came simple and clear: “Money.”

  Roth asked for a list of fifteen writers who needed help, and back in New York he hatched a plan. Setting up a bank account he called the Ad Hoc Czech Fund, he drafted fifteen writer friends to contribute a hundred dollars a month, matching each of them to a writer in Prague. “It made it more personal if they had a name rather than a fund,” Roth explains. On that principle, he set up Arthur Schlesinger with a historian and Arthur Miller with a playwright; other writers he enlisted included John Updike, Alison Lurie, John Cheever, William Styron, and John Hersey. On the Czech side, Roth notes, Klíma was on the list the first year but took himself off the next, when his situation improved. (Roth had also arranged an academic appointment for Klíma at Bucknell, the sort of honor that could get him out of Czechoslovakia. But Klíma declined, “because of solidarity, and because he didn’t want to have it easier than the others,” Roth says, adding, “He’s a saint.”) Kundera, always “a lone wolf,” in Roth’s description, was never part of the plan.

  Of course, the intended recipients’ mail was routinely opened, so the Ad Hoc funders couldn’t just send them checks. “I took the money over to a downmarket travel agency in Yorkville,” Roth explains today. “I was looking for one that was really grubby, less likely to be infiltrated by the government, and I found one with papers piled up in the windows, really slovenly, and this guy behind the counter who looked like the fat headwaiter in Casablanca.” These places specialized in getting money to family members behind the Iron Curtain. “I’d give him the money and he’d send off fifteen coupons—Tuzek coupons—that were redeemable in Prague banks, in hard currency.” Roth was careful to vary the actual amounts—sometimes he sent off two or three small coupons per month—as well as the times he sent them, to keep from arousing suspicion and allow even blacklisted writers to cash them in. Klíma made sure that all the coupons had been received,
and he would write discreetly either to his sister in the United States or to Roth. “It was a hole in the fabric,” Roth acknowledges, “and it worked.”

  He had another idea for helping out, with far wider consequences: getting these writers read. This was impossible in Czechoslovakia. But it might be made to happen in America and looked to be a good thing all around: good for the writers’ sense of being heard, maybe even good for their political protection—international fame had undoubtedly helped Solzhenitsyn—and good for American readers. Back in New York, he took this argument and a list of works he admired to an editor at Penguin Books. The result was a series, Writers from the Other Europe, which began publication in 1974 and continued until the Velvet Revolution and its concomitant freedoms, seventeen volumes later, in 1989. These books had all been published in English, and the translations were not new; but “each book had been brought out, singly, by a different publishing house, as a good deed,” Roth says, “and it died.” Not only was he bringing books together but, as general editor of the series, he was continually reading new candidates, selecting cover art, and outfitting each volume with an introduction by an esteemed, attention-getting writer. Roth himself wrote the introduction for one of the first volumes, Kundera’s Laughable Loves—at the time, virtually no one in the United States knew who Kundera was—and others were introduced by the likes of John Updike, Angela Carter, and Joseph Brodsky. “I wanted to send them into the world with a flourish,” Roth says, lightly waving his hand. “It was my own little Hogarth Press.”