The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  These pages added up to six volumes, four of them published under the overall title Mercy of a Rude Stream, beginning in 1994 with A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park. Without taking into account this astonishing late-life opus, it is impossible to gain any vantage on the scope of Roth’s endowments as a writer—and the pathos of his decision to turn his back on them. Mercy of a Rude Stream is shot through with unwieldy genius, a clunky insistence on getting at the elusive and often ugly heart of the matter that is without parallel in contemporary literature. All four books, of which the second and the third—A Diving Rock on the Hudson and From Bondage—are the strongest, display an almost manic urge for documentation, as if a naturally garrulous man whose jaws have been wired shut has finally been released into the liberation of speech.

  Although Mercy of a Rude Stream contains patches of wooden writing, it also demonstrates Roth’s undiminished lyric brilliance and skill with dialogue; his keen social antennae for the slights of class and race; his psychological acuity, as well as his descriptive energy, and what can only be called the enforced intimacy of his prose. Most strikingly, though, this transparently autobiographical cycle does battle with tawdry aspects of Roth’s own character, as revealed through his young alter ego, Ira Stigman, whose angst-filled journey from terrified child to fledgling artist is tracked in this multivolume bildungsroman. (A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park begins a year after Call It Sleep leaves off, and Ira is clearly an extension of David Schearl.) It was Roth’s misfortune—or perhaps his ornery gift—that he was incapable of prettifying his experience. His compulsion to come clean about ancient, grimy secrets can be viewed in many different lights, as heroic or masochistic or exhibitionistic, but what can’t be denied is that his unflinching unself-protective candor leaves most of what we think of as confessional literature, with its sidelong glance at the good opinion of the reader, in the dust.

  Redemption clears away some of the lingering myths around Roth (that he was a “spurned prodigy” who stopped writing because he felt ignored) and confirms other perceptions (the Oedipal undertone in Call It Sleep turned out to be just the merest fictional hint of a real-life familial enmeshment). From a purely sensational angle, the most fascinating—and repellent—incident in Roth’s vivid and volatile life, one that outdoes everything else in shock value, was his decade-long incestuous relationship with his sister, Rose. The siblings’ involvement started with “groping” when Rose was ten and Henry was twelve, and developed over the next four years into full-scale sexual relations. The “murky slough of his self-indulgence,” as Roth described these acts by way of his stand-in, Ira, left him with an enduring sense of horror and mortification that was the cause, he believed, of both his warped personality and his writer’s block.

  Of course, there’s a case to be made that this perverted family romance both silenced Roth and hurt him into his finest art. He had scratched his sister out of the picture in Call It Sleep, recasting himself as an only child, although it was Rose who typed up the manuscript of the novel and, years later, was responsible for revealing her brother’s whereabouts to an admiring editor after his work had fallen out of print. But something moved Roth to expose this “canker in the soul” in the most graphic (and, as he pointed out, exaggerated) terms when he began writing again in his early seventies. Although Ira is siblingless in the first installment, a sister suddenly appears, rising up from the rubble of the past like a blast from the unconscious, in the second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson. Despite Rose’s pleas that he not betray their involvement, Roth went ahead and spilled the steaming beans. He had never taken the devoted Rose into account, not even after she graciously shared half of their father’s meager estate with him after Roth had been cut off with just a dollar, and he wasn’t about to start doing so. “For me she scarcely existed,” he told an interviewer in 1977. “She was never important.” (Under threat of legal action, he did eventually pay her ten thousand dollars and agreed to take out all further references to the incestuous aspect of their relationship in the remaining volumes.)

  Oddly enough (and to comprehend all, needless to say, is not to forgive all), within the context of the violently dysfunctional marriage of their parents and the generally xenophobic climate of the Roth household, the incestuous detour makes a kind of anthropological sense, as though an ingrained Jewish pattern of tribal endogamy had been taken to its logical conclusion. “It was,” Roth would write in A Diving Rock on the Hudson, “like a sneaky mini-family.”

  Kellman, who avoids the urge to reduce Roth’s life to neon headlines, fills in the contours of his subject’s higgledy-piggledy route ably enough. We begin with his troubled childhood under the venomous scrutiny of a father who is possibly even worse than the father in Call It Sleep and a mother every bit as doting as her fictional portrait suggests, then witness Roth’s escape into art with the help of his lover and mentor, Eda Lou Walton. Throughout his life, Roth would be dependent on the kindness of women who supported him both emotionally and financially. Walton, a prolific writer and a generous teacher, was twelve years older than Roth when she took the twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer under her wing. He lived with Walton while he wrote Call It Sleep (the novel is dedicated to her), and she introduced him to Greenwich Village literary salons, where he hobnobbed with Margaret Mead and Louise Bogan. But Roth never had any trouble severing connections with people who had outworn their usefulness, and when he found himself floundering, having burned the manuscript of his second novel in disgust, he turned to another self-sacrificing mother figure. In 1938, at Yaddo (where Walton had arranged for his stay), he met Muriel Parker, a gifted composer and musician whose patrician lineage led back to the Mayflower, and he credited her with saving him. “I feel that Muriel just retrieved me in time,” he told an interviewer. “I don’t think I would have lived very long; I just didn’t feel like it.”

  Their marriage of fifty-one years appears to have been a blissfully symbiotic union, although it didn’t leave much room for Roth’s two sons, who both became alienated from their father as adults. In 1968, after twenty-two years of dour New England weather, Roth and his wife moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, captivated by its warmth and light, where they lived in a mobile home. (Roth, as one and all attest, inherited his reviled father’s inability to part with money.) After Muriel’s death in 1990, a grief-stricken Roth found it difficult to continue writing and was hospitalized for six months for suicidal depression. He eventually rebounded, with his usual sly force, and spent the last few years of his life in a ramshackle stucco house that had originally been designed as a funeral parlor, a fitting residence for the morbid and ailing writer, who displayed an inscription of the Cumaean Sibyl’s pronouncement “Apothanein Thelo”—“I wish to die”—in his study.

  Kellman has done a scrupulous job of research, but there is, all the same, something recalcitrant about the material, some way in which the shards of Roth’s fragmented narrative—its “grave and disabling discontinuity,” as he called it in From Bondage—resist being glued together even after the chronology is in place, the dramatis personae established, and the events sketched in. The mystery of who the man was—of why he was the way he was—persists. Undoubtedly, this has something to do with the fact that, more than most people, Roth retained a certain plasticity of temperament throughout his life, a receptivity to the imprinting of new experience that spoke either to the lingering infantilism he felt cursed by or to a genuine porousness. A striking instance of this was his love-hate attitude toward his Jewishness, which led him from a complete renunciation of his religious past (a declared atheist at the age of fourteen, in 1963 he was still of the opinion that the best thing Jews could do would be to circulate themselves out of existence) to an embrace of Zionism as an antidote to “exilic insecurity” and a belief in the value of Jewish community in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War.

  Roth’s vastly mercurial nature, whatever the reasons behind it, created many shifts in both physical locale and psychological
orientation. As a result, the narrative feels somewhat disorganized, as though Kellman were overwhelmed by the necessity of keeping track of everything, of logging one rambunctious detail after another. The list of jobs Roth worked could fill a paragraph all on its own: “Roth’s occupations would have to include not only novelist and waterfowl farmer but also newspaper peddler, messenger, bus conductor, soda pop vendor, plumber’s assistant, ditchdigger, English teacher, precision tool grinder, firefighter, maple syrup vendor, blueberry picker, woodcutter, psychiatric hospital attendant, and tutor in math and Latin.”

  “Really you know,” Roth once wrote to Eda Lou Walton, “the artist is just a maniac who somehow evades the bug-house.” There is indeed something heartrending about the example of Roth’s life, as well as something monstrous. What I’m not sure there is, though, is the edifying message this book’s title might lead us to expect. Granted, there are bright moments as well as blighted ones, and not everyone disappoints or acts badly—although to the end Roth senior never ceased denigrating his son, not even when he came to stay with Henry and his family during the summers after his wife died, calling him “a schmo who had married a shiksa and didn’t amount to anything.”

  Notwithstanding its prelude and coda of literary triumph, Roth’s life remains in many ways a rags-to-rags story, marked from its penurious beginning to its frugal, penny-pinching end by a lasting sense of psychological impoverishment that manifested itself in a grimly contrarian attitude. These are dark and murky waters Kellman has ventured into, and it’s small wonder that other writers before him—including Leonard Michaels, who considered writing Roth’s biography, and Philip Roth, who toyed with the idea of fictionalizing the older Roth’s life—backed off. Michaels, according to Kellman, was “depressed by his subject.” And no wonder.

  Kellman’s book presents us with a profoundly disturbing sense of the damage that can take place in families and the toll this damage exacts on its recipients, especially if they happen to be gifted. In Roth’s case, this took the form of an underlying emotional instability, like a fault line running through him. “A sorrow had dislodged something in him,” he observed in A Diving Rock on the Hudson. “He had worried too far: like prying apart something that wouldn’t come together again, wouldn’t come together right, had left a weakness, a chronic vulnerability to unhappiness.”

  The notion of the wounded artist—the writer or painter who plies his or her “golden handiwork,” as Yeats called it, to placate demons or fill in absences—is so common as to verge on the truistic, and yet the example of Roth’s embattled life and career reminds us that great injury doesn’t always yield to the wish, or even the ability, to transpose it into something of aesthetic value. Sometimes pain merely yields to more pain. To say that Roth suffered for his writing is to say little; to say that he suffered too much to find an enduring refuge in his art is perhaps closer to the truth. Which may be why the experience of reading Redemption isn’t so much redemptive as unsettling, in spite of its poignant image of the enfeebled but indomitable old geezer, plagued with crippling arthritis, persevering with his craft even as urine runs down his leg.

  It was Roth’s declared wish to die with his “books on,” which is what he essentially did. All the same, one is tempted to ask in his case, even more so than is usual when reading about the often disastrous private lives of creative people, if the work was worth the anguish. All that pain for all that prose: Did it exact too high a human cost? “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Fiasco” was one of Roth’s provisional titles for the autobiographical musings that became Mercy of a Rude Stream. As a summing up, it suggests the piercing self-awareness of the man, his undeluded familiarity with the pitfalls and dips in the “landscape of the self,” as he called it. “I’m a wretch,” Roth announced toward the end of his life. Ah, but how well he wrote.

  A TIP OF THE HAT

  (JOHN UPDIKE)

  2009

  Of few writers can it truly be said that they embody Henry James’s description of the artist as “a person on whom nothing is lost.” Most writers have curiosity about some things but not about others; their interests are usually obsessive and thus preclusive. They may wish to know how memory evolves, as Proust did in Swann’s Way; or how football works, as Frederick Exley did in A Fan’s Notes; or how real estate is sold, as Jane Smiley did in Good Faith.

  Once in a while, however, a writer comes along who has an omnivorous appetite for description and the bric-a-brac of knowledge—who is at ease in the imaginative as well as the critical realm, in the visual as well as the literary arts, who is as intrigued by dashboards as he is by women’s pinkish interiors. Such a writer was John Updike, from his earliest fiction and reviews up to his final essay, “The Writer in Winter,” which appeared in the November/December issue of AARP magazine. No literary snob, he, for all that he was criticized for being one. It’s impossible to imagine other writers of his stature (Philip Roth, for instance) stooping to reflect for that publication’s Life Lessons column. In this piece Updike observed, with his scrupulous eye, that when he looked back at his prose from twenty or thirty years ago, “the quality I admire and fear to have lost is its carefree bounce, its snap, its exuberant air of slight excess. The author, in his boyish innocence, is calling, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, upon unseen powers—the prodigious potential of this flexible language’s vast vocabulary.”

  Indeed, with the exception of Nabokov, no writer inheres in the details quite as much as Updike. His almost OCD compulsion to translate everything he saw, heard, appreciated, and disapproved of (including much of contemporary life) into honed, even finicky words on the page may render him too promiscuous a talent for true gravitas, as James Wood once suggested. Or it may simply underline the way in which he takes in the chaos and clatter of the world with an attentive and unfailingly courteous vision. What is certain is that his metaphors usually succeed in what they set out to do: widening the lens rather than simply calling attention to themselves, as leaps of associative derring-do in the way of many younger writers. What is also certain is that, much like Cheever, Updike is a sucker for poignancy, for the sense of “irrecoverable loss.” In 1976’s “Here Come the Maples,” a quintessentially Updikean story in its theme (the failure of marital intimacy) and tone (elegiac), Richard Maple appreciates his wife, Joan, most fully as he is driving her to divorce court: “All those years, he had blamed her for everything—for the traffic jam in Central Square, for the blasts of noise on the mail boat, for the difference in the levels of their beds. No longer: he had set her adrift from omnipotence. He had set her free, free from fault. She was to him as Gretel to Hänsel, a kindred creature moving beside him down a path while birds behind them ate the bread crumbs.”

  In keeping with his sense of decorum, his apparent disinterest in ordinary fame (“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,” he wrote in Self-Consciousness), and his wish to keep chosen aspects of his life private, the news of Updike’s death at seventy-six from lung cancer on Tuesday came as a shock. Like many fans, I last caught sight of him on November 12 on Charlie Rose (his sixteenth appearance!), where he was promoting his latest novel, The Widows of Eastwick. He conversed with Rose in his rueful and polished style about growing old and continuing to write amid diminished expectations, about the continuing need to write because that was what one did. He had seemed the very epitome of witful aging, his intellectual energy blazing out from slanted brown eyes and his impish grin firmly in place.

  All of which led me to wonder after the fact who outside his family had known that he was harboring a fatal disease, that he was about to go off into the gloaming (one of his favorite words), leaving behind him a staggering—nay, Victorian—legacy of sixty-one books, including the much-lauded Rabbit tetralogy (two of which received the Pulitzer Prize), the Bech trilogy, nine volumes of poetry, numerous collections of book reviews and short stories, two books on art, and a collection of golf writing. Watching him that evening, I was struck not by the aura of obliviousn
ess and entitlement that presumably led David Foster Wallace to dub him a “Great Male Narcissist” or by the aura of senescence that led Tom Wolfe to christen him one of his “Three Stooges” (along with Norman Mailer and John Irving) in a Harper’s essay. “He’s an old man, he’s my age, and he doesn’t have the energy left to be doing something about the year 2020 in a town north of Boston,” Wolfe noted, referring to Updike’s 1997 novel, Toward the End of Time. I was struck, rather, by the opposite qualities: by Updike’s lively engagement, his lack of swagger (unless an intensity of will qualifies as such), and an almost imperceptible air of bewilderment as to how and when he and the American reading public had parted ways.

  Tributes have appeared and will no doubt continue to appear, attesting to Updike’s dazzling gifts, sexual candor (which, in its anthropological focus, inspired many an embarrassed titter in its day), and preeminent standing among modern American writers. But the reality is that the world outside the literati (and sometimes including them) no longer much cared after a certain point—say, 1990—what Updike had to say. He would always be reviewed with reflexive respect, and his name would come up as a perennial Nobel contender (notwithstanding Cynthia Ozick’s conviction that his American brand of small-town Protestantism kept him out of the game). But somewhere along the way—somewhere between the marginalization of suburban angst and the dawn of multiculturalism—the fizz had gone out of Updike’s name. The news he was bringing was no longer cutting-edge but seemed steeped in nostalgia for lost cultural signposts. His vaunted cosmopolitanism began to feel dated, stuck in a moment when the de haut en bas tone of The New Yorker editorials still prevailed. He began to seem like a man who always wore a hat to work.