Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  Roth was attracted not only by the terrible predicament of these writers or the politics of their books. Eastern European writers “revealed a whole side of literature that is muted in the American tradition,” he says, a side that he still values highly. Call it a detached relation to realism. (Roth rightly objects to the term “surrealism” in regard to these books.) “The richness of the screwball strain” is another way he puts it. Although he says that he did not really wish to pursue this in his own work, it could be argued that he had been pursuing it, on his own, ever since Portnoy’s Complaint. “American realism is a powerful source,” Roth tells me, “and I love it—it’s given us Bellow and Updike—but it’s only one literary given.” These writers from “the other Europe” were giving him something else, an angled and sometimes inverted vision that had to do with their descent from Kafka, even when, as in the case of Kundera, Roth also found traces of his other presiding literary god, Chekhov.

  Kundera’s Laughable Loves is not a political book but, rather, a collection of stories that focus on “the private world of erotic possibilities,” in the words of Roth’s introduction. It contains one story—“Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead”—that Roth found strikingly “Chekhovian” in its tenderness, its concern for passing time, and its sheer quality. Roth notes that Kundera has a sense of humor often lacking in the erotic specialists of other traditions, such as, say, Mailer and Mishima. (The sexual humor in Roth’s own work goes unmentioned.) He points out that even in Kundera’s most political book, The Joke, the young protagonist, sentenced to years of labor in a coal mine for a harmless joke, takes a purely sexual (if comically foiled) revenge, attempting to seduce his political betrayer’s wife. Sexual revenge is the only possible kind, Roth implies, for a man who is “otherwise wholly assailable.” (A world away, in Newark, one hears Alexander Portnoy’s cry: “My wang was all I really had that I could call my own.”) For Roth, it is important that Kundera, even in his bleakest work, remains “fundamentally amused by the uses to which a man will think to put his sexual member, or the uses to which his member will put him”—and, more, that this amusement prevents him from even approaching the sexual mysticism or the ideology of orgasm that characterizes so many other male writers on sex (pace Mailer and Mishima). Satire, amusement, self-amusement, eros, vulnerability, “a striking air of candor that borders somehow on impropriety”: these are some of the qualities that Roth was finding in Kundera and his colleagues. Small wonder that he felt a sense of kinship—of discovering long-lost brothers.

  On his next trip to Prague, in 1974, Ivan Klíma introduced him to another talented dissident (and self-declared heir of Kafka), Václav Havel. Havel’s plays had been banned by the regime and his passport confiscated, but he had managed to keep out of further trouble. Roth was already familiar with his work. Ironically, Havel’s absurdist dramas with their political overtones had become part of New York’s Off-Broadway theater scene—The Memorandum was performed during Joseph Papp’s first season at The Public Theater, in 1968. Havel had traveled to New York to see it and stayed on for several weeks; he returned to Prague the summer that the Soviet tanks rolled in. The Memorandum won an Obie Award for Best Foreign Play—Havel got another Obie in 1970—but, of course, he could not travel to collect them. Klíma, Havel, and Roth met over lunch, with Klíma serving as translator. Havel had come in from his home in the countryside, where he had been keeping a low profile and trying to write—“but he was still stewing,” Roth says, knowingly. “Just because you live in the country doesn’t mean you can stop stewing.”

  In fact, Havel had come to Prague to show Klíma a letter he’d been composing, addressed to the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Gustáv Husák. Roth remembers Klíma’s reaction very well: “You are going to get in a lot of trouble.” (As, indeed, he did, when the thirty-three-page letter was published in English in the British journal Encounter—once backed by the CIA, and still assertively anti-Soviet—the following year. “So far, you and your government have chosen the easy way out for yourselves,” Havel wrote, “and the most dangerous road for society.”) Roth also remembers Havel’s intelligence and wit, which came across even in translation. At one point Havel spoke a little English, and Roth still enjoys—and has employed in his writing—one of his mistaken idioms. “Things had got so bad” for someone, Havel said, that “he committed suitcase.” Roth didn’t laugh, because the subject was too serious and the malapropism seemed rather brilliant: “When you leave here for good,” he says, “it makes perfect sense to say that you commit suitcase.”

  Roth was also introduced that spring to Kafka’s niece Vera Saudková, the daughter of Kafka’s youngest and favorite sister, Ottla, who died at Auschwitz. (Kafka’s two other sisters died either in the Łódź ghetto, where they were sent from Prague, or in the Chełmno death camp.) A woman in her early fifties, Saudková was born three years before her uncle’s death. A letter from Kafka to Max Brod compared little Vera’s delight when he praised her attempts to walk, even after she had plumped down on her bottom, to his own delight with Brod’s praise of his recent novel (which happened to be The Castle). Roth was enchanted just to be in her presence.

  She still had Kafka’s writing desk in her possession, and she let him sit at it. She showed him a drawer full of family photographs, some of which were familiar, but many of which had not been published. He was particularly struck by a photograph of Kafka’s father as a very old man, being pushed in a wheelchair, especially when Saudková told him that this most famously intimidating of fathers “had taken Kafka’s death brutally, and had never recovered.” Holding the photograph, Roth found his mind humming with Kafka’s famous lines about his father, beginning, “Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it”—more than thirty years later, Roth recites the lines from memory as he tells this story. And all the while he was staring at the image of “this aged father,” he says, “to whom grief and defeat had happened, as they do to all.”

  Roth visited Saudková several times. She had once worked at what Roth calls “an ill-named Prague publishing house, Freedom House,” but lost her job, like everyone associated with socialist liberalism, when the Russians came in. Eager to provide help and, possibly, get her out of Czechoslovakia, Roth asked her during one of his visits if she might care to marry him. The proposal was strictly a matter of politics and friendship. (Roth had in mind W. H. Auden’s marriage to Erika Mann in 1935, which gave the bride British citizenship.) Saudková thanked him but declined. Prague was her city, she’d had her whole life there, and her two teenage sons were growing up there; despite the difficulties, she didn’t want to leave. (“Or else,” Roth remarks, deadpan, “she was waiting for an offer from John Updike.”)

  As the series title Writers from the Other Europe suggests, Roth was eager to present writers from beyond Czechoslovakia. In 1974, he traveled from Prague to Budapest, and Hungarian writers were soon added to the series. Polish writers were introduced through the counsel of a Polish-born friend in New York, Joanna Rostropowicz Clark, and Roth considers the Yugoslav novelist Danilo Kiš (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich) one of the finest writers, along with Kundera, whom the series made known. Although the original focus was on living writers, for evident political reasons, it eventually widened to include the quicksilver Polish Jewish genius Bruno Schulz, who was murdered by a Nazi soldier in 1942, and whose work was almost completely unknown; and Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish writer of perfectly matter-of-fact and entirely harrowing concentration camp stories, who had been a member of the Warsaw underground and had lived through Auschwitz before he committed suicide, at twenty-eight, in 1951. Roth was accomplishing many things with this series of books. Not least, however, he was opening himself to the question that Alexander Portnoy had refused to hear: Where would you be now if you had been born in Europe instead of America?

  By the mid-seventies, he was traveling back and forth so regularly that he began to draw attenti
on. In Prague, he was used to being followed. But one day, when he was being trailed by his “usual” plainclothesman, he was suddenly approached by two uniformed police. “They said I had to go with them,” he recalls, “but they didn’t touch me. I showed them my passport, but they didn’t seem to care. We were standing near a trolley stop, so I yelled out to the people waiting there, in English and French, my name, and that I was an American citizen, and they should tell someone at the embassy if I was arrested.” And then, when both of the officers walked off to consult with the plainclothesman, Roth seized his chance and jumped onto a trolley. “I rode for ten minutes, and then I hopped off and took a trolley in another direction,” he says. “When I thought I knew where I was, I got off and went to a phone kiosk and called Ivan Klíma—and he said, ‘Philip, they’re just trying to scare you.’ Well, they did.” But the incident wasn’t over. “That night they arrested Ivan. They took him down to the police station, but he knew how to be questioned. They asked him, ‘Why does Philip Roth come back to Prague year after year?’ And he had the perfect answer. ‘Don’t you read his books?’ he asked them. ‘He comes for the girls.’”

  And Then He Sends Me Claire

  The Czech financial transfers fell apart when, after a few successful years, Roth was convinced by his friend Jerzy Kosinski, then the president of PEN, to let PEN take over the arrangements. “Because it would be tax-deductible,” Roth explains now, with chagrin. “I said to Jerzy, it doesn’t matter, nobody cares, but finally I gave in.” He had already written a long, unsigned report for PEN, sent to all its members, offering information about Czech dissident writers and precise details about the covert methods that the government used—in violation of international copyright laws—to confiscate their foreign royalties. But the committee handling the transfers now complained about restricting the money to Czechoslovakia, claiming that PEN was “playing into the State Department’s hands” by “doing this anti-Communist thing,” Roth recalls, shaking his head. Their point: Why shouldn’t money also go to writers victimized by fascist governments that the United States upholds? “So the whole thing ended,” he says. “I’ve always known all my life, if you want to do anything, do it yourself and keep it small.” And, he adds, “I was sick about it. I had as little to do with PEN after that as I could.”

  In 1977, the Czech government refused to grant him a visa. He was persona non grata and, although his interest in the writers there never flagged, he was unable to return to Prague until 1990, after the Velvet Revolution, when Václav Havel had been elected president, and Ivan Klíma met him at the airport. But there was no going back to the life he’d led before his experiences in Prague. During the late seventies, Roth began making regular trips to Paris, where Milan Kundera, now a good friend, had managed to relocate, and by the early eighties he was also regularly visiting Israel, where he was drawn by the kind of moral fervor he had known in Prague. More immediately, though, the task of remaking his life was continuing through a romance he had begun with the English actress Claire Bloom. They had met before on a few occasions, when one or both had been tied to other people. When they ran into each other on a New York street in 1975, Roth’s relationship with Barbara Sproul had ended—although they remained (and remain) friends—and Bloom had gone through a second divorce. Bloom found Roth, she has said, unusually handsome and intellectually daunting. He was equally impressed with her, and for good reason.

  Bloom was the granddaughter of Eastern European Jews who settled in London; in a memoir she wrote in 1996, Leaving a Doll’s House, she recalls her family’s Yiddish-accented wonder when the press dubbed her “the English Rose.” Extraordinarily precocious, she had made her professional acting debut at fifteen, played Ophelia to Paul Scofield’s Hamlet at seventeen, and become a star with the movie Limelight, opposite Charlie Chaplin, at twenty-one. (Roth says he fell in love with her on-screen when he saw Limelight in a Newark movie house in 1952.) She was now forty-four—two years older than Roth—and, he still recalls, “astonishingly beautiful.” She lived in London with her teenage daughter and was in New York only on a brief visit. But she returned a few months later, in February 1976, and they saw each other every night; he was taken not just with her beauty but with everything about her. “The avidness with which we talked!” he recalls—“about our pasts, about our work, about difficulties, about books.” She had more nineteenth-century English novels in her head than anyone he’d known “outside a college English department.” And he was fascinated by her life as an actress, which he felt had many similarities with (and equally interesting differences from) his own imaginative work. Within a year the pair had decided to live together, spending half their time at his Connecticut farmhouse, the other half at her house in London. Love had given him another world, just when he needed it most.

  It was an exciting world, by any standards. His earliest London experience with Bloom was a three-week visit in the late summer of 1976, staying in her house on the edge of Chelsea; he recalls that her daughter was away for all but the last couple of days of his stay. Bloom was rehearsing a play based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, directed by Harold Pinter, and Roth walked her to rehearsal at a church in South Kensington every morning—“I was so delighted to be with her”—and then picked her up when the rehearsal was over. In this coming and going, he had frequent occasion to talk with Pinter, and he and Bloom were soon a foursome at dinner with Pinter and his soon-to-be wife, Antonia Fraser. When, the following year, he rented a writing studio in Notting Hill, not far from the home that Pinter and Fraser shared, he frequently met one or both of them for lunch at a neighborhood restaurant. Roth is a great admirer of Pinter’s work and can talk with gusto and precision about the “social edge” that distinguishes his plays from Beckett’s. The friendship was important to him throughout his early years in London.

  He also renewed his friendship with the British poet and critic Al Alvarez, whom he had met on a long-ago visit and who introduced him to his Hampstead neighbors David Cornwell (otherwise known as John le Carré) and Alfred Brendel—the first great musician Roth had met, he says, except for a brush with Toscanini at a party back in the fifties. In London, he went to hear Brendel play whenever he could. And dinner at the Brendels’ might include Isaiah Berlin and Noel Annan. So who wanted to stay home? “I socialized in London fifty times more than I ever did in New York,” he says today. “At the beginning, I didn’t get the idea. I wanted to read at night. Then I realized that reading at night was for the country.”

  And, as if London were determined to make up for Prague, he got to spend time there with another of Kafka’s nieces, Marianne Steiner, a daughter of Kafka’s middle sister, Valerie. Then in her sixties, Steiner had been eleven when her uncle died, and shared memories of the Prague that they had known together. Her family had escaped the Nazis in 1939, returned to Prague after the war, and then escaped the Communists in 1948. She had inherited a number of Kafka’s major manuscripts (The Castle, The Metamorphosis, Amerika) from Max Brod, who had taken them with him to safety in Palestine in 1939. It was Brod whose decision to ignore Kafka’s instructions and to publish rather than burn the manuscripts had upended fate and made Kafka into “the Kafka.” (Brod died in Tel Aviv in 1968. Twenty years later, when his heirs sold the manuscript of The Trial to the state-run German Literature Archive for nearly two million dollars—it outbid libraries in England and Israel—the German book dealer who brokered the purchase was quoted in The New York Times, saying, “This is perhaps the most important work in 20th-century German literature, and Germany had to have it.” Roth responded with an angry letter to the paper, pointing out the “lurid Kafkaesque irony” of both the statement and the purchase.) Steiner left her manuscripts to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, in the country that had saved her family, twice.

  And there were the bookshops. Almost the first thing Roth did when he arrived in London was to check out the bookshops on Fulham Road, near Bloom’s house. As ever, he was feeding an enormous lit
erary appetite. He still relates with palpable excitement his discovery, in a London bookshop, of the works of Robert Musil, which he found stunning (and curiously Bellow-like) in the way they “incorporated mind into the fabric of the prose. Not behind it, as in The Magic Mountain, where the characters have philosophical discussions,” he says, “but within the fabric of the prose itself.” London publishers offered an array of books that he had never encountered before: there was Curzio Malaparte (whose work he found in Bloom’s own library) and a number of followers of Freud, including the “entertaining but screwy” Georg Groddeck, and Sándor Ferenczi, one of whose contributions to analytic theory, Roth notes, was to have the patient sit in his lap. (“That would have cut my analysis in half.”)

  But he was searching specifically for books by Eastern European writers. It was in a London bookshop that he came across the mordant comedies of Witold Gombrowicz—a homosexual Polish aristocrat who had spent much of his adult life in poverty in Buenos Aires, a satirist, a rule breaker, and, for Roth, an immediate confrere. He quickly added Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke to the series, and he negotiated with the publisher to append an essay that Gombrowicz himself had written on the book. The subject of immaturity, a Gombrowicz specialty—championed over what passes for maturity and frustratingly misunderstood by critics—formed a particular tie with Roth’s own literary past. (In the essay, Gombrowicz, whose first story collection was titled Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity, wrote, “Consequently the critics exclaimed joyfully: ‘Look at him! He isn’t mature!’” After which, he added, “Immaturity—what a compromising, disagreeable word!—became my war cry.”) And although Gombrowicz was not the only modern novelist to give a protagonist his own name, the fact that he was willing to “put himself at the center of the chaos,” Roth says, was more than a little exciting to him. Finally, there was simply “his devilishness, like the devilishness in Pinter, that I liked.”