Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  And he was missing home. In The Counterlife, Zuckerman defends America to the Israeli settlers, who maintain that a Jew has no business making a home anywhere but Israel; among the homogeneous English, too, he longs for melting-pot America. He even gives a bit of a patriotic lecture: “I could not think of any historical society that had achieved the level of tolerance institutionalized in America or that had placed pluralism smack at the center of its publicly advertised dream of itself.” It was a dream Roth was eager to believe in again. In terms of his work, he was feeling caught between worlds: unable to write about the “opaque” world of the reticent English and drifting further away from his American base. “I just felt lost,” he says. Most of all, he missed the language: “the jumpy beat of American English,” as Zuckerman puts it, out of which Roth had built his novels, and beside which British English had turned out to be as useful to him, he says, as Latvian. He began having regular Sunday breakfasts with another American-born friend, the painter R. B. Kitaj, at an American-style diner on Fulham Road called Tootsies, where he tried to abate his growing longing for American food, talk, and people.

  But he had troubles far greater than homesickness during this period. A harrowing range of illnesses and bungled treatments and medical chain reactions might reasonably have accounted for years of literary silence. The fact that Roth continued writing during the late eighties is evidence both of an unrelenting work ethic, for which he credits his father, and of the fact that writing was the essential condition of his life. In the fall of 1986, while staying alone in Connecticut, he had a recurrence of intense back pain, which left him barely able to sit, stand, or drive, even to the nearest supermarket; Sandy came from his home in Chicago to help him get through it. At the end of the year, he suffered a knee injury in the London pool where he swam nearly every morning, for the sake of his back as well as his heart. The injury led to knee surgery in March 1987 in New York, but a misdiagnosis of the problem and a now disapproved procedure resulted in increased pain. The ameliorating drugs that were prescribed included the sleeping aid Halcion, an innocuous-looking pill so potentially dangerous that it would soon be taken off the market in several countries. In Roth, it brought on a panoply of horrific side effects: hallucinations, panic attacks, and ultimately a suicidal depression that went on for four tortured months before the symptoms were traced to their source. Then he had to go cold turkey to get off the Halcion. Just two years later, in the summer of 1989, his heart condition caught up with him, and he underwent emergency quintuple bypass surgery, the same dangerous procedure that he had given to both Zuckerman brothers in The Counterlife. As he told an interviewer at the time, the experience was of absolutely no use to him, because he had already put it in a book.

  The Facts, written in the wake of the Halcion devastation, is for most of its length a plainspoken, fairly dry autobiography. Roth has called it a sequel to The Counterlife; he has even called it “my counterlife”—that is, his life untransformed by fiction. In the opening pages, he explains that he began writing the book “as a spontaneous therapeutic response” to the drug’s near obliteration of his sense of self, which had left him in an alarming state of uncertainty about “why I do what I do, why I live where I live, why I share my life with the one I do.” The Facts, then, is an act of psychic reconstruction, focusing on the crucial fact of “what I do,” as Roth retraces the steps that led him to the signal moment when “the manic side of my imagination took off” and “I became my own writer.” If he could figure out how he got there once, he could get there again. The book covers just the first thirty-five or so years of his life—Roth was then fifty-five—and the imaginative takeoff to which it leads is the writing of Portnoy’s Complaint.

  This loss of self was especially fraught for a writer who drew so deeply on the personal. While many victims of such a nightmare might have turned to their childhood to get their bearings, it is telling that for Roth the personal self and the writing self had become virtually indistinguishable. (“Memories of the past,” he reminds us, “are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.” To some degree, we all make up our histories.) But there was another reason that he had decided to retrace his childhood: an “eruption of parental longing,” also brought on by the depression. Although well into middle age, Roth reported himself in need of “a palliative for the loss of a mother who still, in my mind, seems to have died inexplicably,” and in equal need of a way “to hearten me as I come closer and closer and closer to an eighty-six-year-old father viewing the end of life as a thing as near to his face as the mirror he shaves in.”

  Closer and closer and closer. The tenderness in Roth’s treatment of Jewish men of his father’s generation had been one of the steadiest aspects of his work since Letting Go, not excluding the extremely hardworking, well-meaning, and permanently constipated Jack Portnoy. This recurring type gave even lesser books (such as The Professor of Desire) some of their most highly charged and touching moments. Now Roth was expressing his love directly, with an unconflicted openness that he explains he was unable to feel during his teenage years, when he lived in his father’s house and was shaped (and countershaped) by his father’s iron will. “After nearly forty years of living far from home,” he writes, “I’m equipped at last to be the most loving of sons.”

  At the other emotional extreme, he is still inflamed about his marriage to Maggie (whom he calls Josie; he changed the names of all the women in his life after the manuscript was completed). He also covers his Bucknell years and the assault at the Yeshiva University symposium in 1962; he pays tribute to the turbulent sixties and to the New York Jewish friends in whose company he performed the mixture of reporting and Dada that turned into Portnoy. But The Facts basically divides into the immortally juxtaposed forces of good and evil: his parents and Maggie, who are not unrelated in the virtues and vices that they represent. For Maggie was “blighted at the core by irresponsible parenting,” and Roth stumbled into her trap—a total innocent—precisely because the world that his parents had built was so fundamentally decent that he was unable even to conceive that, in marrying, any evil could befall him.

  All of which Nathan Zuckerman jeers right off the page. The narrative of The Facts is framed by two letters. One, from Roth to Zuckerman, at the opening, asks for a candid evaluation of the text; after all, Roth isn’t used to writing without some Zuckerman-like intermediary. Zuckerman’s reply comes in a much longer letter at the close, and is immediately notable for the color and amped-up energy of a voice that seems to be more Roth’s than Roth’s, so to speak: the voice of the novelist, at last. Which is very much part of Zuckerman’s point. “I am your permission,” he tells Roth, “your indiscretion, the key to disclosure.” Without Zuckerman—or some other mask—Roth is kind, discreet, and far from exciting. Also, far from truthful. “Where’s the anger?” Zuckerman rails at him. Where are the familiar and vivifying grievances, the criticism, the satire, the disgust? “You’ve begun to make where you came from look like a serene, desirable, pastoral haven,” he charges, “when, I suspect, it was more like a detention house.” It is simply not credible that this arcadian childhood led Roth to write Portnoy’s Complaint.

  Or, to marry Maggie—“a woman who had a sign on her saying STAY AWAY KEEP OUT” and who was not something that merely happened to him but something that he “made happen.” Zuckerman insists that she ought to be honored in the book with her real name, as Roth’s only full-scale antagonist and the person most responsible for making him the writer that he is. When Roth calls her his “greatest creative-writing teacher” earlier in the book, he’s just trying to be interesting; but it’s also the truth. He still hasn’t given her enough credit. She’s the heroine of his life, the heroine he was looking for: “the psychopath through whose agency you achieved the freedom from being a pleasing, analytic, lovingly manipulative good boy who would never have been much of a writer.” Without her, there would have been no consuming anger, without the anger no psychiat
rist, and no Portnoy’s Complaint or any of the real and literary results of that book. In short, he owed her everything.

  The letter also reveals that Nathan’s wife returned to him after their quarrel, in The Counterlife, and—rather a long time later, it seems—is still pregnant. Maria, too, has read the manuscript and is intensely worried for the Zuckerman family’s future, on the irrefutable evidence that Roth is “still on that Jewish stuff.” Nathan is worried, too, but his chief concern is to avoid extinction and make Roth understand how much the books require his presence. He doesn’t have to work so hard to convince the reader. The plainest fact of The Facts is that Roth without Zuckerman is “what you get in practically any artist without his imagination.” The implicit lesson of The Facts is that the only way to reach the truth is through fiction. Hence Zuckerman’s candid advice about Roth’s text: “Don’t publish.”

  But publish he did, in 1988, the same year that he was changing his life again. After eleven years spent half in London, he returned to America full-time, living alternately in the Connecticut farmhouse and in New York, where, with Bloom, he settled into an Upper West Side apartment on West Seventy-seventh Street, with a view of the skyscrapers of midtown. He also acquired a writing studio two blocks away, on West Seventy-ninth—which, given the professional concentration in the area, he calls Writer’s Block. “I used to walk around sometimes and say, ‘I’m home,’” he says. “I’d just stand on a street corner and smile.”

  One of the joys of coming home was teaching again. He was appointed Distinguished Professor of Literature at Hunter College, a highly regarded branch of the City University of New York. There were more adults among the students at Hunter than in the standard liberal arts college, and their range of experience made the classes very rewarding for the distinguished professor. “They were intense, demanding, talkative,” he says of the students. “I could really make contact with them, and they could make contact with the books.” He taught one course a year for three years, the contents varying according to his interests: Eastern European writers, American writers. One year, he taught what he unofficially called a Holocaust course, with readings that included Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (published in the Writers from the Other Europe series) and Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, about Treblinka. He had the students make drawings of the camp layout, according to Sereny’s precise descriptions, “to really know how impossible it was to escape.”

  And he taught several books by Primo Levi, who had become personally important to Roth in these years. A great admirer of Levi’s work, Roth met the Italian writer in the spring of 1986, when Levi was visiting London. In the hour or so they spent together—Levi spoke exacting English—they formed a bond that both could feel. That summer, Roth suggested to The New York Times that he do a long interview with Levi, on the American release of his latest book, The Monkey’s Wrench. Roth flew to Turin with Claire Bloom and spent several days in Levi’s company, forming a kind of friendship by immersion, and one that went remarkably deep.

  Levi, who was thirteen years older than Roth, was not the first camp survivor Roth had met (both Ivan Klíma and Aharon Appelfeld had been in concentration camps as children), nor was he the first writer Roth had met whom he frankly considered to be a genius (that was Bellow). But Levi was both a survivor and a genius, as well as a lively and unpretentious man. After many hours of talk together, Roth “distilled” a conversation that ranged from the attributes that had enabled Levi to survive Auschwitz (Roth proposed that Levi’s systematic intellect had something to do with it; Levi countered that it was nothing but luck) to his ability to combine a nearly thirty-year career as a chemist and the manager of a paint factory with his work as a writer. Roth’s appreciation for Levi’s factory career seems touched with a romanticism that Roth sometimes brings to work outside the solitariness of writing, a sort of semicomic yet genuinely heartsore, Chekhovian longing. “His work answered the need for other people,” Roth says of Levi today. “I would give my right arm for that kind of connection while I’m writing.” One thinks of Zuckerman’s desire to be a doctor (or a pornographer) and of Roth’s pleasure in the classroom.

  At Roth’s request, Levi showed him and Bloom around the factory, although he had retired from it a dozen years earlier—Levi was then sixty-seven—and took them on a tour, too, of his native Turin. (Levi’s scrupulous biographer, Ian Thomson, depicts Levi taking Roth into the cathedral to view the Shroud of Turin, but in this instance Thomson seems to have slipped. Roth says that this never happened, nor could it possibly have happened: “He knew I’d just turn around and walk out.”) When Roth and Levi parted, they wept and embraced—“which was not characteristic of either of us, really,” Roth says—and Levi said, “I don’t know which is the older brother, and which is the younger brother.”

  By the time Roth left Turin, he felt that he’d made a friend for life. There were letters back and forth, with Roth encouraging Levi and his wife, Lucia, to visit the United States, promising a series of speaking engagements, introductions to congenial people, and, in general, a wonderful time. Roth had been proposing such a trip even before he left Turin. Although Levi had undertaken an American book tour just a year earlier, his answer was always the same: “It’s too late.” Roth believes that Levi meant, in part, that literary fame had come too late, but also that he could not escape caretaking duties for his ninety-one-year-old mother, now paralyzed by a stroke, who lived with the Levis in the same apartment where Levi was born. “At least, he thought he could not go away for more than a few days,” Roth says. “I don’t really know the situation. He was the most devoted Jewish son you ever met.”

  Levi was a secular Jew, connected to the Jews of Turin by a sense of history rather than by religion. The Turinese Jews are Sephardic, with a lineage that can be traced back hundreds of years—to Avignon, to Spain. “Of course, that was interesting to him,” Roth tells me. And he speaks of the contrast with the Eastern European Jews of his own background: “We don’t know how far back we go. If we, too, knew where we came from and how far back we went and who the people were, we, too, would be interested, as Jews. But we stop, we stop, and all the witnesses to our past were destroyed.”

  Roth was in London when he heard of Levi’s death, in April 1987, just seven months after the time they’d spent together. “I was dumbstruck,” he says: “The effect was staggering—it hit me like the assassinations of the sixties.” Roth spent that afternoon at the home of the Italian journalist Gaia Servadio, the mutual friend who had introduced him to Levi, consoling each other. Levi had died in a fall from the third-floor landing into the stairwell of his apartment building, and his death has commonly been deemed a suicide. Roth, without claiming any special knowledge, thinks that this verdict is probably correct. He points out that Levi was extremely depressed by his domestic situation, and that he’d recently had prostate surgery, which had doubtless left him at least temporarily incontinent, as such surgery generally does. “He was a meticulous man,” Roth says. “He couldn’t stand it.” Roth also blames the fact that Levi had left his factory job to write full-time, confining himself to the family apartment. Many people consider Levi’s memories of Auschwitz to be the “real” cause of his death—the headline in Corriere della Sera was CRUSHED BY THE PHANTOM OF THE CAMP—but Roth believes that if these memories played any role, it was because Levi had returned to the subject in The Drowned and the Saved, the meditative work that he completed shortly before his death. Roth assigned the book to the students in his course. “It’s a masterpiece of grief,” he says now, “and of thinking about grief, and to think of him thinking about this every day…”

  Roth himself was not quite back to writing fiction yet. The novelistic amplitude that he’d discovered in The Counterlife required more strength than he could summon in the post-Halcion late eighties, a period that he now characterizes as “an in-between time.” Only in hindsight was it clear to him that he was “fighting my way toward a big b
ook.” Still trying to regain his equilibrium, in early 1988 he traveled to Israel to interview his friend Aharon Appelfeld, a living lesson in how to overcome horrific damage. Appelfeld had escaped from a concentration camp at the age of eight and had spent three years hiding from the Nazis in Ukrainian forests, yet he was now an admired Israeli novelist and a husband and father, living a steady, productive life. While Roth was in Jerusalem, he saw a notice in a newspaper about the trial of John Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian-born Cleveland autoworker who stood accused of having been an infamously brutal camp guard, known as Ivan the Terrible, at Treblinka. Roth attended sessions of the trial and took careful notes, although he had no idea how he might use them. Back in the States, he took still more notes, now about his father’s disintegrating health: a brain tumor was diagnosed just as Roth and Bloom were moving to New York. Being with his father, paying close attention to him—as he hadn’t been able to do with his mother—was Roth’s way of dealing with the impending loss. Yet, while these grave and difficult subjects were weighing on his mind, waiting for the imaginative process to begin, he completed a little book of remarkably high spirits and high risks.