Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  If all this new life fed into the intensity of The Counterlife, so did Roth’s feeling during much of the eighties that he was living on borrowed time, because of his heart condition and the questionably adequate medication. Also adding to the intensity, he admits, was the fact that he was having a secret affair. As he describes it, the woman was thirty when he met her—Roth was not quite fifty—unhappily married, and the mother of a small child. She was English, an Oxford graduate, and initially called to interview him for the BBC. She was also exceptionally eloquent; he seems to have been smitten as much by the felicities of her speech as by her looks. (It was through her, he says, that he learned about “upper-middle-class English life.”) Their relationship took place entirely within the narrow confines of his writing studio, except for a few walks on Hampstead Heath and a couple of “accidental” meetings at concerts, occasions that they felt somehow gave them the license to go out to dinner together afterward. (“It wasn’t exactly rational,” he says with a shrug.) Is it any more rational to ask why the affair took place at all? Is it ever?

  In the Bloom household, the tensions between Roth and Bloom’s daughter, Anna—or between Roth and Bloom over her behavior with Anna—had become extremely wearing for all. In 1978, Anna, who was eighteen and a student at London’s Guildhall School of Music, left the house and moved into a residence hall, at Bloom’s request, in response to Roth’s request. The move prompted an emotional crisis that was still painful to Bloom nearly twenty years later, when she wrote about it in her memoir. But Anna returned home for good a few months later, and the three of them resumed exactly where they had left off. Bloom, caught in what she describes as a “no-win situation,” and “attempting to make up for what I had failed to do in the past,” acknowledged that her behavior with her daughter over the years “made Philip feel as though he was an intruder in our closed circle.” The fact that he found another circle to include him may or may not require such an explanation. In any case, Roth now says that he was “elated” by the affair. But nothing was more elating than the book that this counterlife was helping him to write.

  As it begins, Henry Zuckerman, Nathan’s brother and a successful New Jersey dentist and family man, has learned that he has a potentially fatal heart condition. Since the only effective medication renders him impotent, and since the high point of Henry’s life is having sex with his dental assistant, he talks his doctor into performing risky multiple bypass surgery, and dies. Or else: Henry survives the surgery, but his brush with death has made the limitations of his life all too clear, and, in search of greater meaning, he leaves his family to join a settler community on Israel’s West Bank—or, in the settlers’ terms, Judea—where Nathan tracks him down in order to talk some secular sense into him and perhaps get him to return to his wife and children. Or maybe: It is really Nathan who has the heart problem and a passionate affair that makes him decide to risk the surgery, and Nathan who dies. His long-estranged brother, Henry, sneaking into Nathan’s Manhattan apartment after the funeral, finds the manuscript of Nathan’s latest novel, which contains the wholly fictionalized account of Henry’s heart trouble, as well as details of a not-so-fictional affair that he once had the bad sense to confess to Nathan, and the entirely insane adventure in Judea—the same chapters we have just read. Betrayed and infuriated by his brother’s writing—again!—Henry destroys the chapters. Or else—why not?—Nathan, impotent from the medication, has found the love of his life in a young Englishwoman whose verbal flair is so endearing that the erotics of speech almost make up for the more conventional kind. But, seeking greater meaning in his life, he wants to marry her and become, for the first time, at forty-five, a father. Nathan has the operation, he survives, and he moves with his new and pregnant wife to London, where the anti-Semitism of English society makes him so argumentative that one night she simply walks out of the book.

  Such a summary makes The Counterlife sound coyly postmodern, but there is nothing random or left to chance in its reversals and revisions. The book is a masterwork of craft and wit: its narratives flash and twine with the same jeweler’s precision that Roth had brought to the final chapters of The Anatomy Lesson, but here the workmanship is extended to three hundred and seventy-one pages. Its themes—the human need for transformation, the human need for meaning, the Jew in history, the power of lust, the power of language, the power of landscape, the volatility of identity—are as compellingly embodied as Roth’s insidious gift for talk and countertalk can make them. “If you seriously want to renew your life, there’s no way around taking a serious risk,” Nathan says, steeling his future wife for the possible outcome of his surgery. His words apply as well to Roth pouring his forces into a novel of complex ideas rendered in an equally complex form, a book not quite like anything that anyone had written before.

  Roth speaks of The Counterlife as the turning point of his career, the book that “changed everything.” Almost a quarter century after its publication, much of what he says boils down to the matter of size. “It was an aesthetic discovery, how to enlarge, how to amplify, how to be free,” he explains to me one day. “I didn’t know how to do it. I knew how to condense.” When he is reminded of the ample size of Letting Go, he laughs dismissively, and when asked what he has learned about writing in the intervening years, he replies simply, “Everything.” As for postmodernism, he had absolutely no desire to write a postmodern book. In The Anatomy Lesson, Nathan Zuckerman is interviewed by some university students on the debilitating subject of “the future of his kind of fiction in the post-modernist era of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon”—a dismal future, presumably, reflected in questions like “Do you feel yourself part of a rearguard action, in the service of a declining tradition?” Roth, however, remains as placidly uninterested in literary trends (although postmodern writers have been his friends) as he is in any kind of literary theory. “John Barth was a very nice man,” he says, “but give me John Updike.”

  So how did the structure of the book come about? “I wrote one section and then I thought, ‘What if the opposite happened?’” he says. “I generally spend a lot of time in the ‘what if’ stage.” There’s plenty of precedent for these practices in his 1974 book, My Life as a Man, in which two different opening autobiographies turn out to be the fictional works of a narrator who titles the next section “My True Story.” And as Roth sees it, he was veritably pushed into questioning the boundaries of fiction by the public’s assumption that Portnoy’s Complaint was a personal confession. It would be hard to mistake The Counterlife for a confession, since it is not consistently written from a first-person point of view, or even from a single point of view. Yet Roth now brought the same vocal immediacy that had made Portnoy so persuasive—his confiding, close-up, artfully artless style—to a book in which dead characters return to life. (Roth likes to say that he had to kill Zuckerman “just to make people stop saying that I write only about my own experience.”) It’s a testament to the power of words on the page, to our eager susceptibility as readers, and to Roth’s skills not as a postmodernist but as a fervent realist that our emotions are engaged even when the fiction is tauntingly exposed.

  Despite the hall-of-mirrors intricacy, Roth wrote The Counterlife in exactly the way that he writes everything: spontaneously, with one incident providing inspiration for the next. There was no initial plan and no outline—he’d last used an outline, he tells me, with Letting Go (“and you see where that got me”). He doesn’t produce more than a page or two a day—sometimes, agonizingly, less—but he works his way through several drafts.

  “The first draft is really a floor under my feet,” he says, addressing a recent class at Columbia taught by a friend, Benjamin Taylor, and speaking, despite his retirement, in a somewhat poignant present tense: “What I want to do is to get the story down and know what happens.” Then the language begins to develop, and the story inevitably becomes more complex. “The book really comes to life in the rewriting,” he says, and he does a lot of it. When he’s take
n it as far as he can go, he gives the manuscript to a few close readers: “people who I know are on my side, but who will speak candidly.” He has relied on this practice since the beginning, with his Chicago friends Ted Solotaroff and Richard Stern; the writers Alison Lurie, Joel Conarroe, Hermione Lee, and Judith Thurman are among those he enlisted later on. (He never uses more than four readers for a single book—“any more would drive you crazy”—and he likes to vary the people, depending on the book.) Aside from the specific points these readers make, Roth says, “they give me back the subject in a way I haven’t seen it.” He holds himself to a mantra during the initial writing: “What it’s about is none of your business”—meaning that he isn’t interested in “themes.” His job is simply to make the book persuasive. “I don’t mean to be falsely naive,” he tells me after the class: “By the third draft I have a good picture of what my concerns are.” Still, it’s helpful and sometimes surprising to have these readers tell him “what the book is ‘about.’”

  He had no doubt that The Counterlife would be “about” Israel, at least in part. Roth had visited the country for the first time in 1963, when he was invited to participate in a symposium about Jewish writers, in Tel Aviv, and had traveled around on his own for a few weeks. “This was before Israel was defensive and belligerent and everyone was asking why you didn’t come to live there,” he tells me. “This was before the wars.” Writing at the end of the sixties, he set the final chapter of Portnoy’s Complaint in Israel—the pre-1967 Israel of his memories, where the only artillery is metaphorical and refers to the power of the sun. But he now finds this section to be weak, “not fired by imagination.” His imagination was deeply fired, however, when he returned in the early eighties, to what seemed a very different country. “It wasn’t Israel as California anymore,” he says. “It was Israel as the Middle East, and all that people could talk about was politics.”

  He went back regularly after that and tried to experience every aspect of the country. He toured Jerusalem with Aharon Appelfeld. He visited several West Bank settlements with a leader of the settler movement, Elyakim Haetzni. (“My liberal Israeli friends would not have found him delightful,” he says, “but I was just interested in listening.” Indeed, Roth reports that the novelist Amos Elon was furious with him for visiting the settlements, no matter the purpose—“What if I had gone to visit Joe McCarthy in America?” Elon asked—and argued that Roth’s mere presence would be taken for approval. This did not stop Roth from returning, although he kept his profile very low.) He went into the Negev with a leading Israeli scholar of Bedouin culture, Clinton Bailey, to dine in a tent—“or, rather, a lean-to,” he says, “a tent sounds too romantic”—with Bedouins. And everywhere, he took notes, while responding to “the dilemmas, the contradictions, the moral choices,” and “especially to the moral anguish of Israelis on the Left.” As a writer, his feelings were not so different from those he had experienced in the seventies in Prague—another place with “conflicts and antagonism right on the surface,” he tells me—or, for that matter, in the sixties in New York. “I knew,” he concludes, just as he did about Prague, “that there was something here for me.”

  Israel was the moral and historical subject that Roth had been looking for: not somebody else’s Warsaw or his childhood Atlantis or totalitarian Prague but the land the Jews had truly bought a part of with their nickels and their lives. And it was credibly his subject, both in terms of what he called, in a video interview for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, “a natural allegiance, by no means as dense with meaning as my allegiance to America, but dense with sentiment,” and in terms of a familiar opposition to his life as an American Jew. In The Counterlife, contemporary Israelis replace the dwindling generation of European Jews on the other side of the historical scale, as continuing victims of the violence that Roth had eluded in America, the country that gave him, like Nathan Zuckerman, a childhood in place of an annihilating war.

  “Jews,” Nathan reflects in a startlingly incisive throwaway line, “are to history what Eskimos are to snow.” And modern Jews had willfully remade their history. When it came to counterlives, Israel was a nationwide inspiration. “Who better than the Jews who went to Palestine to show this theme?” Roth asks in conversation. “They changed their language, they changed their names, they became farmers, they even changed the shape of their bodies, developed muscles—the goal was to change their identity entirely.” In The Counterlife, Nathan, visiting his brother in a West Bank settlement, contemplates the influence of the land itself on Henry, a gun-toting refugee from the peace and safety of New Jersey:

  As for the larger landscape, you could see, particularly in this light, how someone might get the impression that it had been created in only seven days, unlike England, say, whose countryside appeared to be the creation of a God who’d had four or five chances to come back to perfect it and smooth it out, to tame and retame it until it was utterly habitable by every last man and beast. Judea was something that had been left just as it had been made; this could have passed for a piece of the moon to which the Jews had been sadistically exiled by their worst enemies rather than the place they passionately maintained was theirs and no one else’s from time immemorial. What he finds in this landscape, I thought, is a correlative for the sense of himself he would now prefer to effect, the harsh and rugged pioneer with that pistol in his pocket.

  Still, Nathan cannot help wondering if the most truly Jewish thing about his brother—“our father’s best son”—is not that he has moved to Israel, or is learning Hebrew, or has found his people or his God, but that he felt impelled to do all these morally irreproachable things in order to justify leaving his wife.

  As a subject, Israel also seems to have offered a strangely welcome note of danger. (“You envy me,” an Israeli friend scolds Nathan, “you think, ‘Craziness and dangerousness—that sounds like fun!’”) The Counterlife is crowded with characters who voice their conflicting and often peculiar views about Israel, while Nathan plays the role of Diaspora straight man. An American-born Alvin Pepler–style intrusive fan and nutcase, who comes upon Nathan near the Wailing Wall, turns out to be a hijacker, on an El Al flight, no less. (Unlike Pepler, he gets a fully developed plot.) The leader of a one-man movement, described in a tract titled “Forget Remembering!,” he is dedicated to the dismantling of Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial and to the general goal that Jews forget the Holocaust entirely. Everyone else is sick of hearing about it, after all; who knows what further retribution lies in store? “No more masochism to make Jews crazy—no more sadism to stoke goy hate!” he yells. How did he come up with such a manic idea? “Every idea I ever had,” he tells Nathan admiringly, “I got from reading your books!”

  At the other extreme, in Judea, Nathan meets the leader of the settlers, whose physical and mental qualities are conjoined with true Dickensian authority: “His face had the sardonic mobility that comes of peering nobly down upon self-deceiving mankind from the high elevation of Hard Truth.” Roth, careful not to stack the deck, presents the man as thoroughly paranoid but not a monster; he recites his hard political line while proudly showing off “the treasured leatherbound masterpieces collected in Berlin by his grandfather, a celebrated philologist gassed at Auschwitz.” (Roth’s writing rarely draws attention to itself. The startling thud of “Auschwitz” at the end of this phrase is rendered through both sound and sense: the lulling rhythm of the old masterpieces and the grandfather, the sudden hiss of “gassed.”) One of Nathan’s liberal Israeli friends is worried, in fact, that Nathan will put this “lying, fanatical, right-wing son of a bitch” into a novel, fearing the influence that such a character might have on the American opinion that determines American financial aid that, in turn, determines Israel’s ability to fight its foes. Although Nathan is quick to note that “Congress does not depend upon prose narrative to figure out how to divvy up the take,” it is clear that the stakes are extraordinarily high. Here, the consequences even of stories can be life and d
eath. And Nathan is at risk, once again, of being “the dangerous, potentially destructive Jewish writer poised to misrepresent and ruin everything.” One might almost imagine that Roth missed the rabbis.

  Yet Roth felt that he didn’t know enough about Israel to set an entire book there. Nor did he feel that he understood the English well enough to set an entire book there, even after he’d been living in London half the year for some eight years. In his Paris Review interview, published shortly before he started The Counterlife, Roth explained to Hermione Lee that it had taken Isaac Bashevis Singer about twenty years to get Poland sufficiently out of his system, and America sufficiently into it, to begin writing about his famous upper Broadway cafeterias. “If you don’t know the fantasy life of a country,” Roth said, “it’s hard to write fiction about it that isn’t just description of the decor, human and otherwise.” He confessed that he didn’t really know “what means what” to the English and that his perceptions were especially clouded by speaking the same language, more or less—“I believe I know what’s being said, you see, even if I don’t.” But his biggest problem in writing about England was that “I don’t hate anything here.” This lack of antagonism made it pleasant to reside there as a person but difficult as a writer, since “a writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.” Or, at least, this writer did. “The antidote to his poisons,” Roth acknowledged, “is often a book.”

  By setting England in contrast to Israel, though, he could write about both, with a bit of New York fitted in between to bridge the gap. His horizons were expanding; Zuckerman’s role was diminishing. In a work about changing places, the dual focus on the pair of Jersey-born brothers—one headed for England, one for Israel—became central to the story even before Roth quite realized the importance of the relationship between them. Two very different men, who had been the measure of each other all their lives, each defining himself as what the other was not: the original counterlives. Henry the good son, the family man, the defender of the norm; Nathan the renegade, the family-destroying writer, the gossip column womanizer, the star. “Cain to your Abel,” as Nathan says to Henry. “Esau to your Jacob.” From Nathan to Henry flows love and rue and more or less benign condescension. On Henry’s part, there is love and rue and a festering resentment that ultimately erupts into rage.