Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  By the time the chronology was published, a number of these friends were dying or dead: Janet Hobhouse, Melvin Tumin, Mildred Martin from Bucknell, Bob Maurer from Bucknell. “You think that’s the end of it when your parents die,” he says to me. “After that, you’re done. Nobody’s supposed to die anymore, right?” Veronica Geng was not only Roth’s editor and friend but “the best humorist since S. J. Perelman,” he declares, “only more quirky and moderne”; when Geng underwent surgery for brain cancer, in Sloan-Kettering, Roth would sit with her outside the hospital, where he had brought her in her wheelchair, so that, to the horror of the nurses, she could smoke. He joined a couple of other friends in covering her medical expenses and set up a fund, on the model of his Prague fund, to provide her with financial backup. She was staying in his Manhattan studio, recovering, when a seizure put her back in the hospital; she died on Christmas Eve 1997, aged fifty-six. Another hard death to absorb was George Plimpton’s, in 2003; Plimpton was one of Roth’s oldest friends and a man of apparently indefatigable energy. And then, hardest of all, Saul Bellow, in 2005.

  Bellow was “the ‘other’ I have read from the beginning with the deepest pleasure and admiration,” Roth wrote in the dedication to Reading Myself and Others, in 1975. On a personal level, the men were friendly enough in these earlier years and saw each other from time to time. Roth recalls that he and Bloom gave a dinner party for Bellow in London in 1986, when Bellow was in low spirits, recovering from the death of both of his brothers and the end of his fourth marriage; they also took him to a concert of late Shostakovich quartets, to cheer him up. (Not the most conventional idea of a pick-me-up, perhaps, but, Roth says, “I wanted him to hear something beautiful.”) Bellow thanked him in a letter, since published, in which suffering and its musical relief are weighed in a typically unflinching formulation: “There’s almost enough art to cover the deadly griefs with. Not quite, though. There are always gaps.”

  Yet, despite such occasions and communications, Roth felt that Bellow was generally guarded and kept himself at a remove. (One recalls Felix Abravanel’s charm, in The Ghost Writer, “like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect.”) The men did not become close until several years later. An entry in the Library of America chronology reads “1991: Renews strong friendship with Saul Bellow.”

  Roth credits a turnaround in Bellow’s attitude—that is, the real beginning of their friendship—to Janis Freedman Bellow, whom Bellow married in 1989. Roth still recalls her supportive review of Operation Shylock and is convinced that it was she who got Bellow “to read me seriously.” And he imagines her telling her illustrious husband, sometime after their marriage, “What’s the matter, this guy really likes you, he really admires you, he wants to be your friend.” Whatever she said, it seemed to work. No wonder that, in October 1995, Roth sent Bellow a letter, reading in its entirety, “Dear Saul, At last you’ve married a woman who understands me. Love, Philip.”

  Janis Freedman Bellow, a warm and easygoing woman who now teaches literature at Tufts University, insists that there was no need for her to coax her husband into reading Roth’s work seriously. Together, she says, they discussed Roth’s books endlessly—American Pastoral was a particular Bellow favorite—and, in fact, “the deepening of my appreciation of Philip’s work would have come from Saul.” Concerning the friendship, she believes that her husband was “hungering for a connection to Philip” and that she merely helped him let it happen. There was some tension between the men, she concedes, based on Bellow’s sense of competition. He had a history of saying things he later wished he hadn’t—this is a man who titled a story collection Him with His Foot in His Mouth—and he had said a few of these things to Roth. But he didn’t want to be abrasive anymore. “I had that conciliatory gene,” she admits, “but it’s not like I was kicking him under the table.”

  During the early nineties, when Roth went to Chicago to visit his brother, Sandy, he also visited the Bellows; later on, in summer, he and a few other friends routinely got together at the Bellows’ house in Vermont. Roth’s feeling for Bellow’s work approaches reverence. He speaks freely of having felt “swamped” by Bellow as a writer—“inspired but swamped” by “the uncanny powers of observation, the naturalness, the seeing into human faces.” All in all, “he made me feel like an amateur.” Roth thought that Bellow’s last novel, Ravelstein, published in 2000, was deeply flawed, but Bellow was eighty-four when he finished it. “It’s hard to write a book at eighty-four,” Roth notes, “it’s hard to remember from day to day what you’ve done.” Slightly bending an agreement they had made about mutual candor, Roth told Bellow only that he couldn’t properly evaluate the book because he was “out of sympathy” with the character of Ravelstein, as some people had been out of sympathy with Mickey Sabbath.

  Roth stayed close to Bellow throughout the final, fading years. Even when things were at their worst, Roth was “a constant presence,” Freedman Bellow recalls. He telephoned frequently. “That could be difficult,” she says; “Saul could be repetitive, and a lot of people thought it wasn’t worth it anymore.” And the two would end up laughing. (“That was the main bond,” she adds, “the way they made each other laugh.”) Bellow had read The Plot Against America more than once, and he carried it around with him everywhere. “It was ‘the Book,’” Freedman Bellow says. “The cry around our house was, ‘Where’s the Book? Where’s the Book?’” About a week before he died, Roth tells me, Bellow called to say that he’d had a dream about Lindbergh, in which Bellow said to him, “Pardon me, sir, I don’t mean to pollute you with my Jewish presence.” By then, Bellow’s condition had deteriorated so badly that, in many ways, Roth says, he was “saved by death.” But that didn’t make it any easier when it happened.

  Bellow’s death sent Roth into despair—“about him, about illness, about dying,” he says. Around the same time, in 2005, he underwent back surgery, and continual pain compounded his dark mood. He’d already begun a new book, about an aging actor who has lost his powers; it was based on Claire Bloom’s experience of working with Ralph Richardson, who had told her after a performance one night that “the magic is gone.” Roth put this manuscript aside and, in the days after Bellow’s funeral, began something else. Too uncomfortable to work at his computer, he wrote in longhand, very slowly, groping after what he wanted. He remembered that his father, whose younger brother had died the same year as his wife and several friends, had said to him, “Philip, I can’t look into another hole in the ground.” In his Web of Stories interview, Roth says that he hadn’t quite known what he meant and had offered to attend the latest funeral in his father’s stead. But now he knew. “I guess you reach a point,” he says, “where you can’t look into another hole in the ground.”

  Everyman is a book about death and funerals and holes in the ground, and about the illnesses that take us there. Extremely brief—a novella, really—it was published with an ominous black cover that had no pictorial image, and Roth was highly pleased that the book itself resembled “a tombstone.” Indeed, the story begins at the funeral of the central character and moves backward in time, brushing in the events of his life. Familiar themes are starkly rendered as the aging hero views the domestic chaos he has left in his wake: two angry, embittered sons from a first marriage; a loving (if ultimately sexless) second marriage that he sabotaged for a sexual fling. He retains a good-hearted daughter and a nearly heroic brother, but he is essentially alone as he enters old age. Beyond his largely botched relationships, we know little of this man. Though he wanted to be a painter, he settled for a life in advertising—Roth alerted his brother that he was making use of some of his life’s story—but his biography is composed mainly of medical disasters: a hernia operation when he is nine, a burst appendix at thirty-four, cardiac surgery at fifty-six, and an increasingly frequent series of hospitalizations for angioplasties, the installation of heart stents, and a defibrillator. Decades of health are duly
noted and passed over as beside the point.

  Like the fifteenth-century morality play from which it takes its title, Everyman is about the fate that claims us all: “the adversary that is illness and the calamity that waits in the wings.” In the play, Everyman meets Death himself and speaks what Roth calls the best line in English literature between Chaucer and Shakespeare: “Oh Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind.” Unlike the medieval protagonist, however, Roth’s Everyman does not believe in God or in an afterlife. He is a Jew, but that is a matter of no real significance. (His father owned a jewelry shop that he called Everyman’s, to keep his Jewish name from alienating Christian customers; but by now the fact that Everyman is a Jew seems entirely unremarkable—in itself, perhaps, a remarkable fact.) The only paradise that he knows is his childhood, and the only hell he can imagine is giving up his life right here on earth. There is something invigorating in the book’s relentlessness; Roth seems to be after the brutal directness of those holes in the ground.

  Yet the construct loses power as the book goes on, because it isn’t sufficiently enlivened. Everyman is, by the demands of his identity, entirely ordinary—“content to live by the customary norms, to behave more or less the same as others”—and the account of his trials is plainspoken, medically precise, and somewhat stiff. In American Pastoral, Roth mediated the ordinariness of Swede Levov through Zuckerman’s introspective sensibility. There is no mediation here. The third-person narration seems to issue from Everyman’s point of view—“True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone”—despite the fact that it outlasts his life and describes his funeral; the voice seems constricted by the man’s own limitations. Praise, in this book, consists of words like “reliable,” “amicable,” “moderate,” “agreeable,” and “conscientious.” There may be writers who find such qualities inspiring, but Roth’s best gifts lie elsewhere. As he had feared when he took on shorter books, he seems indeed to be writing with one hand tied behind his back.

  It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the book’s plainspokenness from exhaustion, given the number of opportunities missed. What would Roth once have made of the surgeon, Dr. Smith, born Solly Smulowitz? (We learn here only that he “had grown up in the slums, the son of poor immigrants.”) The redheaded nurse Maureen, from an Irish-Slavic family in the Bronx, has “a blunt way of talking that was fueled by the self-possession of a working-class toughie”—but we never hear her. There’s a lot that we are asked to take on trust. Everyman, “in his joy at having survived” another round of surgery, thinks about his brother: “Was there ever a man whose appetite for life was as contagious as Howie’s?” But we feel neither Howie’s appetite nor our hero’s joy, because Roth doesn’t show them to us; and because the emotion isn’t present in the language—as it was, so richly, in his masterpiece about living and dying, Sabbath’s Theater. True, Roth was trying for something else: a short, intense dose of illness and the calamity of death, as experienced in a society that gives us plenty of time to see it coming.

  Roth’s Everyman is not an allegory, despite the title. It contains no blatant symbols and, certainly, no moral message. The very idea of calling the book Everyman, Roth says, came to him only after he’d finished a first draft without giving the hero a name. Yet there are aspects of the book that seem uncomfortably close to a fairy tale. Who would have thought that one could complain of a book by Roth that its characters are too good? He has portrayed good people many times, with vividness and truth—the warmhearted Norman Cowan in Sabbath’s Theater, Swede Levov in American Pastoral, Roth’s own parents in The Plot Against America—but brother Howie is a cardboard prince, not merely because he is a millionaire, happily married, irreproachably kind, and able to “play water polo as well as polo from atop a pony,” but because of the breathless vantage from which this description seems to emerge. And he’s not the only figure seen this way. Ever since Portnoy, Roth has balanced immense tenderness with rage, one emotion keeping the other in check. But this is a book in which, as Everyman notes, “the tenderness was out of control.” Roth’s narrator—and Roth himself—seems to be operating under the spell of mortality: an amalgam of gratitude, memory, troubled conscience, and longing. Roth has written about this phenomenon in American Pastoral, about the high-pitched admiration that takes hold of people in the limousine traveling behind the hearse.

  There’s a sense of great relief—and a welcome surge of energy—when the characters temporarily lose their constraints and let rip. Everyman sounds off about his unendingly bitter sons (“You wicked bastards! You sulky fuckers!”). The sweet and ingenuous second Mrs. Everyman—a character Roth based on Ann Mudge, his sweet and ingenuous girlfriend of the sixties, who restored his sanity after Maggie—catches her husband in an affair and throws him out. Her fury provides an interesting counterpoint to the views of marriage and sex so central to The Dying Animal:

  Oh, why go on—all these episodes are so well known … The man loses the passion for the marriage and he cannot live without. The wife is pragmatic. The wife is realistic. Yes, passion is gone, she’s older and not what she was, but to her it’s enough to have the physical affection, just being there with him in the bed, she holding him, he holding her. The physical affection, the tenderness, the comradery, the closeness … But he cannot accept that. Because he is a man who cannot live without. Well, you’re going to live without now, mister. You’re going to live without plenty. You’re going to find out what living without is all about!

  And he does. As he nears the end, it turns out that the cost of sex was pretty much everything. This may sound like an old man’s philosophy—“late Roth”—but the knowledge was fully present in “early” Roth; it prompts the crisis that concludes The Professor of Desire, published back in 1977. Knowing the cost, however, does not alter the necessity of the choice or the pain of the results. For Everyman, sex remains the only part of life that kindles his curiosity, even if age restricts him to watching young women jogging past him on a boardwalk, while he yearns for “the last great outburst of everything.”

  Despite its disappointments, Everyman contains set pieces and minor characters that continue to haunt well after the book is closed: a woman with perpetual back pain who commits suicide; a woman who has been sobbing uncontrollably at funerals—upset by the fact that “she isn’t eighteen anymore”—for fifty years. (Does one laugh or cry?) One strong scene depicts a Jewish Orthodox funeral—the funeral of Everyman’s father—during which the mourners themselves take up shovels and, one by one, fill the gaping hole in the ground, looking “like old-fashioned workmen feeding a furnace with fuel.” This ritual process takes close to an hour, and it’s a horrible sight; those who can’t lift a shovel throw in fistfuls of dirt. Everyman wants to make them stop, but the process is unstoppable. Roth was describing Bellow’s funeral, blow by blow, inch by inch of covering dirt, and the thoughts that he had at the time, he says, are the ones that he put into the book: “Now I know what it means to be buried. I didn’t till today.”

  The climactic scene takes place in the same run-down cemetery, off the Jersey Turnpike, where Everyman has gone to visit his parents’ graves. There is a gravedigger there, an amicable man willing to explain the mechanics of his job—a seven-foot spike to probe the spot, a wood frame to shape it—which is the nearest he can come to explaining its mysteries. (Gravedigging is to Everyman what glove manufacturing was to American Pastoral: an everyday job, requiring skill and patience, that helps make our lives appear intelligible.) Despite his lack of religious belief, Everyman speaks a few words to his parents aloud: “I’m seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one”—words hardly eloquent, not remotely a prayer, the plain expression of a common (if astounding) fact. And he seems not at all surprised when his parents reply. “Look back and atone for what you can atone for,” his father advises—for a moment coming close to the language of the medieval play—“and make the best of what you have left.” The hero feels released from fear, although, as it turns out
, he is almost out of time. The end of the book refuses any comfort. There is just the mother’s reply, offering the only satisfaction to be had. “Good,” she says to her boy, an old man himself now and about to die. “You lived.”

  A single line from Everyman has been taken up in newspaper articles as a catchphrase about old age, a species of folk wisdom. The line came to Roth while he was watching television reports of the evacuation of an old-age home during Hurricane Katrina, when people in wheelchairs and on stretchers were being loaded onto a boat, in swirling waters: “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.” The feeling is carried forward into his next book, Exit Ghost—unsurprisingly, since it’s not a feeling likely to recede with age. Yet despite the title and the subject, Exit Ghost abounds with charm, humor, and human complexity. Unlike Everyman, it is neither schematic nor sentimental but a startlingly buoyant if ruthless work about the bitter end.

  The strength of Exit Ghost appears to derive from the presence of Nathan Zuckerman, whom Roth has revived one last time, if only to put the poor man through flaming hoops of shame and humiliation. For Zuckerman truly wishes to be revived: to be back in life again. After eleven years in his mountaintop retreat, basically alone, he has been inspired by the death of a friend named Larry Hollis to change his life, again. Hollis tried to push Zuckerman toward a less lonely and more active life: dinner invitations, Ping-Pong games, a gift of two kittens, who proved so distractingly adorable that Zuckerman had to give them back. (He has turned his back on life not because he is hardened to its charms but because he is too susceptible.) Hollis develops cancer on page twelve and commits suicide on page thirteen, but Zuckerman’s account of the friendship is so genially matter-of-fact that the story is anything but grim. Zuckerman is older and sadder, as much inclined now to ponder as to explode, but no less witty or confidingly sympathetic—an instant intimate who picks up with us as though our own relationship with him had never been disrupted.