Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  It has often been asked why Zuckerman does not return at the end of the book, to round off the story and perhaps to let us know what he has learned in writing it. Roth admits that he initially had such a conclusion in mind, “like the end of a television program,” he tells the students at Bard. “It didn’t dawn on me as quickly as it should have that this is a stupid cliché—a ‘frame,’” he adds dismissively. “So I just decided he would get out of the way.” (In support of this decision, he points out that the narrator at the beginning of Madame Bovary, a boy who went to school with young Charles Bovary, disappears after a few pages and is not heard from again.) Roth is clearly not interested in narrative formulas. Yet the closing party is in almost stately formal balance with the high school reunion near the book’s beginning: two ensemble set pieces that surround the central story with warmth, humor, and a populous richness that does not so much cushion the blows—of Zuckerman’s isolation, of the Swede’s—as set them off.

  This closing scene is bound to history from its opening words: “It was the summer of the Watergate hearings.” The elder Levovs have been glued to the television, watching the hearings all day and the replays at night. Lou Levov, the Swede’s father, is a ringer for the elder Mr. Zuckerman, or Mr. Kepesh, or Mr. Roth: opinionated, dominating, exasperating, profoundly humane. (Herman Roth, during the Watergate hearings, sent daily letters to the participants and once included a bar of soap in a letter to Kissinger, informing him that, after Cambodia, he couldn’t wash his hands enough.) Whether Lou is carrying on about “Mr. Von Nixon and his storm troopers,” or forcing a glass of milk and a piece of pie on the architect’s alcoholic wife (pushing aside her glass of Scotch and feeding her, forkful by forkful), he is a powerhouse and (no surprise) nearly runs away with the scene. Yet Lou Levov is also a man besieged. These old campaigners against the world’s disorder have always been besieged, the odds have always been against them, ever since Herman Roth had to leave school to earn a living. But they come through: they support their families, they do the job of what Roth, in Patrimony, called “making themselves American. The best citizens.” This man has never felt uncertain that he is right about the way to live, or that, if he works hard enough, the right will prevail. Until now.

  The strong but assailable man. Roth’s feeling for him certainly goes back to Herman Roth, but it also goes back to Philip Roth, starting out in his twenties, target of the rabbis and husband of the undivorceable Maggie. The discussion that takes place at the Levovs’ dinner table that evening is about politics, pornography, and decency—carried on with all the urgency of argument and opinion that characterized those years, when the world seemed to be spinning away. “This is the morality of a country that we’re talking about,” Lou says. And it does seem that nothing less is at stake when, late in the evening, Lou emits a very different cry—“Oh my God! No!”—that is a response not to Merry suddenly appearing in her rags, as the Swede imagines, but to the architect’s drunken wife having taken the fork from Lou’s aggressively well-meaning hand and stabbed the old man in the eye. Or nearly in the eye. Her aim is off by a luckily drunken inch. The scene has the crazy gut punch of slapstick, and the last sound we hear is laughter. Yet the once unassailable Lou Levov is suddenly face-to-face with the truth that his son is still trying to master: “He could not prevent anything.” The undoing of these good men, no less than the fires of Newark, marks the end of a civilization.

  Nevertheless, American Pastoral was considered so sympathetic to Merry that, a few years after its publication, Roth was asked to write a letter in support of the parole of Kathy Boudin. Although there are more differences than similarities between the figures—Boudin was in her thirties when she took part in an ostensibly political crime that involved killings, Merry in her teens—the parallels are clear. Yet he declined to write the letter. In part, he tells me, he felt ill equipped to judge the reality: “I’m a novelist, but I’m not Émile Zola.” Stronger feelings emerge when we talk about the fact that Boudin was ultimately released, on her third request for parole, in 2003, and Roth says he believes that “she should have stayed in jail for the rest of her life.” Merry Levov, however, as a careful reader of the book’s first section will note, was never captured. After her father discovers her whereabouts, he continues to see her, in hiding, and to love her without cease until she dies. Books, as Roth is the first to point out, are larger than the people who write them. They contain possibilities—thoughts, emotions, kinds of wisdom, kinds of folly—that emerge, unplanned and unforeseen, from the writing itself.

  Betrayal

  Sabbath’s Theater won the National Book Award in 1995. American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. In between the two, in 1996, Claire Bloom published Leaving a Doll’s House, containing several chapters about her marriage to Roth that gained him more public attention than his own achievements. Although the memoir officially covered the span of Bloom’s life, with accounts of her first two marriages and several glamorous affairs—Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Yul Brynner—no one (including Bloom) appeared to be much interested in anything but her “harrowing account” (in the words of the opening sentence of the Sunday New York Times review) of her life with Roth. The verdict was in even before the book was out. A month before publication, the Times ran an article titled “Claire Bloom Looks Back in Anger at Philip Roth,” announcing that advance copies were already circulating and that gossip was “considerable.” The Los Angeles Times reported a rumor that “Noo Yorkers” weren’t even circulating the whole manuscript, just the “good part.” Vanity Fair ran a chapter; New York magazine ran a cover story headlined “A Hell of a Marriage.” The gist of the book, according to the Times article, was that Roth was filled with what Bloom described as “a deep and irrepressible rage” toward women and was—in the article’s own summation of the charges—“a self-centered misogynist.” This was clearly something that people couldn’t wait to read.

  Overall, Bloom had four chief and chiefly reported-on subjects of complaint. (1) Less than two years into their relationship, Roth had pressured her into asking her eighteen-year-old daughter, Anna, to move out of her London house. Although Bloom was an extremely successful woman in her forties, she writes, “the truth is that I was unable to oppose him,” and was therefore “willing to jettison my own daughter.” It was a grave mistake, although Anna “eventually” returned home. (2) Roth gave the name “Claire” to the character of the betrayed wife in the manuscript of Deception. This time, Bloom was able to oppose him, and to prevail. She reported that she still wore his “guilt offering” of “an exquisite gold snake ring with an emerald head from Bulgari on Fifth Avenue.” (3) Roth’s breakdown, in 1993—three years into their marriage—was, for her, an agonizing emotional roller-coaster ride, during which his behavior was unpredictable and often cruel. He accused her of being no help at all when he was ill. On one occasion, visiting him in the psychiatric hospital, she became so upset that she was kept overnight herself. (4) After deciding to end their marriage, Roth was unwilling to extend himself financially beyond the “unconscionable” terms (her lawyer’s word) of their prenuptial agreement. The hundred-thousand-dollar settlement he finally offered did not even pay for a one-bedroom apartment in New York. In need of money, she was forced to take a job on a daytime soap opera.

  There is much more, some of it fond, much of it ugly, all of it written by a woman who seems to be contending against herself—struggling to be less passive, more independent, a better mother—as much as against the frustrating men in her life. (“I knew that this should be simply an affair, but my needs overwhelmed my knowledge,” she writes, not about Roth but about her second husband, who receives the nickname “the Unmentionable.”) None of the men come off well, with the possible exception of Yul Brynner, who retains a handsome bravado, perhaps because he keeps his distance. Still, in a poor field, Roth—“spectacularly manipulative”; “a game-playing, Machiavellian strategist”—is easily the worst, and so it is rather dismaying
when, toward the end of the book, after a meeting with Roth over coffee some eighteen months after the marriage ended, she reports herself distressed because he doesn’t “want our old life back.”

  Bloom’s indictment had a tremendous effect on Roth’s personal reputation—perhaps more than anything since Portnoy’s Complaint. Of course, not all reviewers were sold on her point of view. In the London Review of Books, Zoë Heller picked up hints that the pain in the marriage was perhaps more evenly inflicted than Bloom acknowledged—on the evidence of lines such as “I felt unfairly misunderstood and just started screaming”—and called the book a cautionary tale to female readers about “the dangers of economic dependence.” But few reviewers questioned Bloom’s facts or even conceded that they might be questioned. In the Times review, Patricia Bosworth noted that Bloom “has collected the facts—she draws on her journal, conversations with lawyers, psychiatrists and friends.” (On the highly charged issue of Bloom’s daughter leaving home, Roth offers the additional facts that Anna had gone to live in her school’s residence hall, twenty minutes away, for a single semester. And that after her return he lived with both Anna and her mother for half of each year for another decade. So much for Machiavelli.) But for many readers, women especially, Bloom’s account was confirmation of all the bad old accusations. There was undeniable pleasure in the idea that—in the teasing words of Marion Winik, in the Los Angeles Times—“Portnoy is getting his.”

  Still, there was only one assessment that really disturbed Roth. In 1999, John Updike published a single sentence about Bloom’s book in an essay on literary biography in The New York Review of Books. Discussing the rise of a genre he termed the “Judas biography,” written by a former spouse or friend to repay a grudge, Updike wrote, “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unraveled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” Roth wrote a letter to the Review, suggesting a slight emendation of the sentence’s all-important verb: “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, alleges him to have been…” Updike responded in print with an affable shrug, stating that the change was fine with him but that he thought his words conveyed “the same sense of one-sided allegations.” Roth did not agree. The wounds had not entirely healed, and he felt betrayed by a friend who ought to have known better—who had actually seen them together and had told New York magazine, as Roth still easily recalls, “how proud and protective Philip seemed of her.” He never spoke to Updike again.

  Roth was stunned by Bloom’s book. The last time he’d seen her, after all, was at that apparently friendly postdivorce date over coffee, in March 1995. She’d written to him afterward to say what a good time she’d had—there was an exchange of several warm and mutually complimentary notes—and they had vaguely planned to meet again. In some ways, he still doesn’t hold her fully responsible for the book: he had worked with her on an earlier memoir, an account of her acting career titled Limelight and After, and he says that she’s too good a writer to have written anything as dreadful as this second memoir by herself. He thought of bringing a lawsuit. But then, he tells me, he knew that the issue would hang over him for years, and this wasn’t where he wanted to put his energies.

  He got out of New York, much as he had got out after Portnoy, leaving for the peace and quiet of Connecticut—“my private Yaddo.” He was accompanied on weekends and vacations by a new steady girlfriend, a doctor just completing her residency, whom he had met in a movie line. (Schindler’s List; mixed reaction.) She cheered him up by writing out a timeline of the events of his life, which showed Bloom’s book as a tiny dot. This, he says, helped to put things in perspective. But, as with all novelists, if more openly so, Roth’s books have a personal germ as well as an intellectual one. In My Life as a Man, he wrote—and demonstrated—that he was “as incapable of not writing about what was killing me as I was of altering or understanding it.” Walking in the Connecticut woods, he tried to imagine an analogy for the way he felt now.

  “To me it seems likely that more acts of personal betrayal were tellingly perpetrated in America in the decade after the war—say, between ’46 and ’56—than in any other period in our history”: Nathan Zuckerman’s former high school English teacher, Murray Ringold, is expounding on the period loosely called the McCarthy era, sitting on Nathan’s back porch in the Berkshires in the summer of 1997. Murray is ninety years old. Nathan is sixty-four, and they are reminiscing about a man each loved in a different way—Murray’s brother, Nathan’s youthful idol—who had been denounced as a Communist in 1952 and died in ruin and disgrace. The analogy was workable. All that was required back then, after all, was an unsupported accusation from a supposedly reputable source to wreck a person’s life. The historian Arthur Schlesinger had told Roth that there were probably as many acts of betrayal perpetrated during the Revolutionary War, but that was not an ideal period for a book set in Newark. And the late forties and fifties were Roth’s era: he had started college in 1950, when Senator McCarthy produced his first public list of “Communists” in government; it was the first major public issue of Roth’s adult life. During the Army–McCarthy hearings, in the spring of 1954, he rushed between his classes and the home of a teacher who owned a television, Bob Maurer, to watch McCarthy finally brought down. The issues had mattered to him then, and they mattered again now. His new subject was betrayal, public and private.

  But few novels—and certainly not Roth’s novels—follow a single line of thought: the process of composition is too long, the byways of memory and imagination too complex. I Married a Communist, published in 1998, is also about a boy’s longing to become a man. In Roth’s view, the subjects are not unconnected. He gives the young Zuckerman his own adolescent passions: the same books that Roth piled into his bicycle basket—baseball titles by John Tunis, Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast—are piled into Zuckerman’s. The stirringly patriotic radio broadcasts that shaped Roth’s sense of the purpose and beauty of language shape Zuckerman’s desire to be a writer. There are several pages devoted solely to Norman Corwin’s V-E Day broadcast, On a Note of Triumph, with its poetic vernacular and its mythicizing spirit. All that was required was to be twelve years old and sitting by the radio in 1945, Nathan recalls, to feel that “you flood into America and America floods into you.”

  It is the radio era in which the growing up and the betrayals take place, a fact as important as the different kinds of betrayal that the novel explores. Norman Corwin is Zuckerman’s faraway boyhood hero, but the close-up heroes who come after him replace not only Corwin but Zuckerman’s devoted yet disappointingly unheroic father. (“We lost Nathan when he was sixteen,” Mr. Zuckerman tells people, sadly. “By which he meant,” Nathan explains, “that I had left him.”) Long before the events of The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman is seeking (and outgrowing) a whole series of spiritual fathers—men with big lives or big ideas, men with things to teach him—and betraying the father he loves. It’s what he has to do on the way to achieving “the orphanhood that is total, which is manhood,” he says. “When you’re out there in this thing alone.”

  The romance of manhood in Roth’s work has never been on fuller display, with the brave and the brawny viewed through young Nathan’s worshipful eyes. In the opening pages alone, “masculine” and “male” and “manly” pile up thickly, as Nathan describes what it was like to have gruff, forceful Murray Ringold—Hero No. 1—as his high school English teacher. An aberration in a profession filled with women, Murray, recently back from the army and the Battle of the Bulge, reveals both teaching and literature to be permissibly masculine pursuits. This was a signal realization for Roth, too. His grade school teachers had all been women (except for gym, which hardly mattered), and the impact of his first male high school teacher, Bob Lowenstein, was considerable. Lowenstein, too, was back from the war, but he didn’t teach English; he monitored Roth’s homeroom in freshman year, making announcements and
taking care of school business. Still, even without the literary mentorship that Roth adds to Murray’s powers, the example came through—when Lowenstein got back in touch in the early nineties, after more than forty years, Roth remembered him well and wrote back eagerly. His presence had been a kind of legitimization: the first real sign, Roth says, that “I could attach brains to manliness.”

  It isn’t just Murray’s emphasis on critical thinking—crucial as that is—or his innate “masculine authority” but his willingness to heave a blackboard eraser at a laggard student that releases the “masculine intensities” in boys like Nathan. Murray’s biggest gift is to teach the tame and well-brought-up Weequahic boys to transgress, to subvert, to say, “I don’t give a good goddamn”—in short, to be free. Whether he has taught anything to the girls is not a question Nathan thinks to ask. The ideal of manhood as freedom from the “cramped up and sivilized” world of women goes back at least to Huckleberry Finn, never mind to Alexander Portnoy. It’s a rite of American literary adolescence, boys’ division. For Nathan, who actually rather likes the civilized aspects of his mother’s house, becoming a man is a matter of careful study and conscious effort, with rules of behavior that extend right down to the “manly” way to eat a piece of pie in a bar and grill.

  Nathan’s greatest mentor is Murray’s brother, Ira Ringold: Hero No. 2, and the central figure of the book, a counterpart of Mickey Sabbath and Swede Levov. Ira is tied to the world not by love (like the Swede) or by hate (like Sabbath) but by a burning desire for justice and by the pleasure of exerting his will to get it: “Everything he wanted to change was here.” Twenty years older than Nathan, Ira is a Communist by conviction and a radio star by circumstance. A giant of a man at six feet six, and the product of a brutalizing family—the only Jewish family in Newark’s all-Italian First Ward—Ira left high school to dig ditches and to work in the zinc mines of northern New Jersey, then joined the army right after Pearl Harbor. Roth modeled Ira on one of the heroes of his own youth, a left-wing ex-GI named Irving Cohen (“the ex-GI in my life,” Roth says), who had married Roth’s older cousin Florence, a huge, rough guy who told stories about being beaten up in the army because of his outspoken views—as Ira is beaten up and called “a nigger-loving Jew bastard” for protesting army segregation. Roth admired the “manliness” of all the GIs coming home, but speaking about Irving Cohen in the Web of Stories interview, he says explicitly, “I brought to him my appetite to be a man.” He sounds exactly like Nathan speaking about Ira, who “brought me into the world of men.” There’s a sense of nearly military induction into an idealized, wartime world of soldier-heroes that Nathan—like Roth—was too young to experience himself.