Roth was also writing. In the summer of 1976, he was near completing a new novel, The Professor of Desire, conceived as the story of David Kepesh’s life before he turned into a giant breast, in which the professor who taught Kafka with a bit too much conviction went to visit the scene of the original crime, Prague. But it’s a sign of Roth’s love for Bloom that, while in London, he spent a great deal of time working not on the novel but on a gift for her: an adaptation, for television, of a Chekhov short story, “The Name-Day Party,” with a leading role for Bloom as a wealthy married woman who cannot bear the social lies that she and her husband tell. “There’s a line I loved,” Roth says now. “‘Why do I smile and lie?’ That’s Chekhov’s ability to do it in six words.” (Although there was some interest from producers, the project didn’t go forward, which Roth still considers a pity: “Claire would have been brilliant in it.”) From Kafka to Chekhov, the pendulum of his own fiction was swinging, as Roth—yielding to domestic happiness, sharing his life (as Chekhov did) with a successful actress—continued to work changes in himself.
The Professor of Desire was published in 1977 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In yet another change, Roth had again followed Aaron Asher to a new publisher, although this time he stayed—even after Asher moved on—for fourteen years. The book, dedicated to Bloom, is about transitions, and is a transitional book. Very different from the boisterous sexual joke of Kepesh’s debut, it is a gently Chekhovian sexual tragedy, with a force that builds out of unlikely beginnings. The early sections, detailing the Catskills childhood and post-adolescent sexual high jinks of a good Jewish boy obsessed with “the detonation of my seed”—young Kepesh, loose in London, enjoys threesomes and a little light whipping—seem rehashed and formulaic; Roth had done this kind of thing much better before. And the book gets worse before it gets better. Kepesh’s marriage to a femme fatale with a mysterious Hong Kong past is simply silly: the femme herself seems like a forced attempt to vary the equally familiar theme of a destructive wife, and a parody of Hemingway’s famed seductress Lady Brett, with lines like “I’d say half the girls who fly out of Rangoon on that crate that goes to Mandalay are generally from Shaker Heights.” (Leave it to Roth, though, to have Kepesh tell her, a few pages after this remark, that there’s a heroine in a book called The Sun Also Rises, named Brett, who reminds him of her.) Lacking the grim power of Lucy Nelson or Maureen Tarnopol, Helen Kepesh is too slight a figure to account for the situation in which her ex-husband finds himself halfway through the book, but there he is: impotent, barely capable of smiling much less of having sex or feeling love, pouring out his guts to his psychiatrist, and howling, “I want somebody!” into the bathroom mirror.
Kepesh tells his story in his own fluent and sardonic voice—Roth’s gift for the first-person intimate remains uncanny—which lacks the hysterical edge (for the most part) of Alexander Portnoy’s, even as Kepesh laments the same painful division between body and soul, or sex and love, or freedom and responsibility, or necessary physical gratification and equally necessary but incompatible happiness. A devoted professor of literature, Kepesh is able to approach the problem analytically and with the aid of many literary references: the book contains passing insights about writers from Melville to Colette, while Kafka and Chekhov loom as large as any of the major characters. On the model of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” in which a speaker recounts “the life I formerly led as an ape,” Kepesh ultimately writes a report to his own Academy—“Honored Members of Literature 341”—about “the life I formerly led as a human being.” His goal is to make the students understand his personal qualifications for teaching a course in the literature of ungovernable erotic desire.
The course is intended, in part, to help him explain his history to himself. But he also has a pedagogical motive. Kepesh wants his students to read novels about sexual desire because, having experienced it themselves, they will be less likely to consign these books to the academic netherworld of “narrative devices, metaphorical motifs, and mythical archetypes”—or even of the old standbys “structure,” “form,” and “symbols.” There’s at least a chance that they will connect this literature to their own lives. (At the time, Roth informed a French interviewer, Alain Finkielkraut, that, as a teacher, he forbade the use of this kind of jargon “on pain of expulsion.”) Because books are not, as the hated formulation of the day would have it, “non-referential.” Books are entirely referential, and what they refer to is life. Kepesh admired Kafka when he read him in college, but it is only later, when the impotence sets in, that Kafka’s “obstructed, thwarted K.’s banging their heads against invisible walls” take on greater meaning. He wonders if The Castle isn’t linked to Kafka’s own erotic problems. Kepesh himself is so horribly obstructed—so “Kafkafied,” in one of his usages—that for a long time he cannot even work on his book about Chekhov.
And then he is saved. Sex, love, and finally—what more proof could he need?—completing the book. On romantic disillusionment in Chekhov. (Did you expect happily ever after? With Chekhov? With Roth?) He reads Chekhov stories every night, “listening for the anguished cry of the trapped and miserable socialized being, the well-bred wives who during dinner with the guests wonder ‘Why do I smile and lie?’” Chekhov, for Kepesh, reveals “the humiliations and failures” of people who seek a way out of restrictions and conventions—out of boredom and stifling despair—people who keep struggling toward a freer life, even though they inevitably fail. Kepesh’s Chekhov seems hardly less oppressive than Kepesh’s Kafka. Yet he has found a way back to life through the Russian writer and, more important, through a young woman who has given him the confidence to write again. “I’d thought the god of women, who doles them out to you, had looked down on me and said, ‘Impossible to please—the hell with him,’” he tells her, bringing her hand to his lips. “And then he sends me Claire.”
Claire Ovington, the heroine of The Professor of Desire, got her first name well before Bloom entered Roth’s life; she is the same girl for whom Kepesh’s desire is fading before he turns into the Breast. (The metamorphosis, oddly enough, works to restore his appetite. There may be a warning here to be careful what you wish for.) Roth says that he simply liked “the open sound” of “Claire.” A twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher, tall and blond, orderly and kind, Claire has used orderliness and kindness to help her survive a difficult childhood and construct a life beyond it. “As tender within as without,” with the scrubbed beauty of an Amish woman and—this is Kepesh, remember—magnificent breasts, Claire is a healer of the wounds inflicted by Maggie/Lucy/Maureen/Helen. She is based, in a general way, on Barbara Sproul; a “beautiful cities” trip is also on Kepesh and Claire’s agenda.
Roth and Sproul were together for six years. It was her desire to have children, Sproul explains—she was then nearing thirty—that caused them to part. “She wanted something I couldn’t give her,” Roth agrees, although he notes that they continued to tend “our baby, Czechoslovakia,” together. There was certainly some sadness at the time of the breakup, but there were no hard feelings—or, considering the circumstances, very few. (Sproul invited him to her wedding, in 1978; he didn’t go.) “He’s a professor, he’s a priest of literature,” she says today, “and I always knew that he was married to his books.”
Kepesh and Claire get twelve pages of happiness before the ebbing and the chafing and the fear, for him, set in. He loves her; he knows that she is the best thing that has happened to him. The fact that she dislikes having semen in her mouth is not important, surely. (“As if such a thing matters! As if Claire is withholding anything that matters!”) One need not admonish Kepesh for stupidity, ingratitude, callowness, or a lunatic and suicidal loss of all perspective: he does this himself, even as memories of a more audacious lover—belonging to his former life, as a different human being—fill his head. This other woman is hardly more than a stick figure, with no existence beyond the sexual, and can be seen as both a failure of the book and part of its point. And if
Claire seems an uncommonly unflawed creature, that, too, is part of the harsh and rueful point. This is the exchange he is unwillingly willing to make.
Reviews were generally favorable, but hesitations were expressed even by the enthusiastic. In The New York Times Book Review, Vance Bourjaily called the book “an erudite examination of the troglodyte within us,” but criticized Roth for making too much of the obvious fact that couples have more sex at the start of a relationship than later on. That’s just the way it is—“a sad, small, universal, necessary joke.” But it’s part of a novelist’s endeavor to render such universal jokes with freshness, surprise, and, when necessary, indignation—the way they hit us before we come to terms, before we know the experience is universal or a joke or anything we may call small. Kepesh struggles to dismiss his sexual restlessness. He is willing to accept, sexually, “a warm plateau” (“I am no longer a little bit of a beast, she is no longer a little bit of a tramp”), but he fears the inevitable, precipitous descent into the cold. Nothing in the book’s superficially charged-up early sex scenes is as disturbing as this calmly measured juxtaposition of love and desire. Everything good on one side of the scale; sex on the other side, pressing it down.
Sexual desire in its absolutism and its folly is a momentous subject, but was it enough of a subject anymore for Roth? In Prague, Kepesh tours a number of Kafka landmarks: his school, the site of his father’s business, the tiny house that his youngest sister rented for him one winter. (In a Kafkaesque dream, he is taken to visit Kafka’s whore, now nearly eighty: ten American dollars to find out what they did together, five more to inspect her anatomy, for literary purposes. Given his field of interest, it’s tax-deductible.) Near the end of the day, he confronts his guide, a man who was also once a literature professor but who lost his job when the tanks rolled in; his wife, formerly a research scientist, now works as a typist in a meat-packing plant. When asked how he gets through each day, the man has a simple reply: “Kafka, of course.” And when, in turn, he asks Kepesh about his interest in Kafka, Kepesh speaks of his former impotence, equating it with the man’s plight—the body’s intransigence felt to him, he explains, like “some unyielding, authoritarian regime.” Kepesh speaks with modesty (“Of course, measured against what you—”) and even wins the man’s sympathy, but the argument seems tainted with self-inflation and does not so easily win the reader.
Roth seems to be struggling to import the larger meanings of his recent European experiences into the narrow frame and focus of an unreconstructedly Portnoyan hero’s life. The result is to make Kepesh appear petulant and small, if eager to outgrow his petulance and smallness. Visiting Kafka’s grave in the little Jewish cemetery outside town, he places a pebble from the gravel walk atop the tombstone—a pebble, too, atop the facing tomb of Max Brod—an act of traditional Jewish homage that he admits he has never performed at the graves of his own grandparents. But this cemetery contains not only the literary great and well remembered. Looking around, Kepesh is surprised to discover plaques all along one wall inscribed to the memory of the Jewish citizens of Prague who were exterminated in Terezín, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau, and to realize that there are not pebbles enough for them all.
The Professor of Desire comes to rich and startling life in its final scene, with the arrival of Kepesh’s garrulous, well-meaning father (a typically scene-stealing Herman Roth) at Kepesh and Claire’s idyllic country house in the Catskills. The only character to possess a voice that easily breaks through the buzz of Kepesh’s thoughts, Mr. Kepesh is accompanied by another old Jewish man with a remarkable voice, a friend he introduces as “a victim of the Nazis” and a survivor of the camps. And as candles burn low during dinner on a perfect summer night, and Bach drifts softly from the record player, the survivor tells his story in a few calmly reflective paragraphs. When he is done, and the old men have gone to bed, Kepesh remarks to Claire that the entire evening—the unexpected tale of a ruined world, the music, their love, their fear of losing each other—is the stuff of a Chekhov story and might be called “The Life I Formerly Led.” That night, he holds Claire tighter than ever before. Because he knows it will not last.
The Life I Formerly Led was a contender for the title of this book. And Roth’s hero, in the end, is being drawn back helplessly to that former life. But in which direction was Roth going? The Professor of Desire mixes outgrown themes with energetic, imaginatively charged new signs and scenes, and with a muted tenderness that is like nothing in his work before. It is neither a book one would want to be without nor a fulfilled achievement. After the trio of facile satires and the literary plunge into the marital abyss, it was certainly encouraging. Yet Roth had not had an important success since Portnoy’s Complaint eight years earlier. And Goodbye, Columbus ten years before that. Two celebrated books in eighteen years. For all his fame and his evident talent, it was not a sterling record. In 1977, Roth’s literary future was, at best, uncertain. Could he free himself from his old and wearing preoccupations? Would he ever find a way to turn the worlds of love and ruin into a story of his own?
The Madness of Art
“Little Beauty” the nurses called her—a silent, dark, emaciated girl—and so, one morning, ready to talk, she told them that the surname was Bellette. Amy she got from an American book she had sobbed over as a child, Little Women. She had decided, during her long silence, to finish growing up in America now that there was nobody left to live with in Amsterdam. After Belsen she figured it might be best to put an ocean the size of the Atlantic between herself and what she needed to forget.
She learned of her father’s survival while waiting to get her teeth examined by the Lonoffs’ family dentist in Stockbridge. She had been three years with foster families in England, and almost a year as a freshman at Athene College, when she picked an old copy of Time out of the pile in the waiting room and, just turning pages, saw a photograph of a Jewish businessman named Otto Frank … She cried for a very long time. But when she went to dinner in the dormitory, she pretended that nothing catastrophic had once again happened to Otto Frank’s Anne.
The Ghost Writer, published in 1979, is a novel so seamless that it appears to have been conceived and poured out whole. In fact, it had been brewing for a long time and had grown out of disparate ideas. Roth had wanted to write about Anne Frank since the early years of his career: to change her history, to have her survive, and to bring her to America, as he had brought Kafka in his story of 1973. The subject of the martyred Jewish girl, however, was much harder to approach. The risks of hagiography on the one hand and tastelessness on the other were all too clear. And what would be the dramatic point? More recently, after several visits to Prague, he’d begun to write about an American novelist who is struggling with the circus-like success that his culture offers—a huge, Portnoyan success—and then, on a trip to Czechoslovakia, becomes involved in the lives of writers with genuine struggles: the story that eventually became The Prague Orgy. He wrote a long draft, beginning with the young writer starting out and continuing with his success, but he realized that he was compressing the material too much. He had enough for several books.
The first of the books, then, was about a young writer coming to grips with the demands of his vocation, through a visit to an older writer who has been his idol. It was a somewhat Jamesian scheme: just the master and the student, more or less, and lessons learned. The older writer would be a figure rather like Malamud, whose work had meant so much to Roth and whom he had visited many times since they met, through a mutual friend, in 1961. Malamud was a master of unassuming tragedies lit by an almost equally painful if compensatory comedy; Roth later compared his “parables of frustration” to Samuel Beckett’s. Off the page, however, he was a reserved and even taciturn figure, with a starchy demeanor that reminded Roth of an insurance agent, one of his father’s colleagues at Metropolitan Life. He recalls Malamud asking his wife to make him half an egg for breakfast. No indulgences. Hardly any laughter, not much by way of conversation: all
of his energies taken up, it seemed to Roth, by “responsibility to his art.” This was an unwavering, all-suffering responsibility—impressive in the man but insufficient for the requirements of a flesh-and-blood fictional character. Malamud was small in stature, and Roth gave his master writer the more imposing physical presence of his friend Philip Guston, whose artistic drive was similarly all-consuming. But there was something still lacking, something he had to add to make this figure dramatically compelling, and more human.
And then Roth recalled that once, while he was visiting the Malamuds at their house in Vermont in the mid-sixties, a girl had been there, a Bennington student, who was doing some sort of clerical work for Malamud. Roth did not meet her, and he didn’t know if she was there for that day only or for a longer time. He caught just a glimpse of her, “sitting on the floor in the other room, going through his papers,” he says now. “The image was like a Vermeer—a woman alone, engaged in something, with a pretty profile.” It was entirely unthinkable that the rather dour man he knew had any romantic or even personal involvement with the girl. But with this flash of memory, Roth found a way to complicate the character, and his disparate ideas for a book began to come together.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 13
