Jewish Wheaties

Roth travels with Barbara Sproul to Asia, while maintaining his opposition to the Vietnam War; his writing turns to satire in a general effort to undermine seriousness in politics and literature Baseball, long a love of Roth’s, emerges in his lengthy burlesque novel, The Great American Novel followed by his semi-autobiographical My Life as a Man (1974), a rebuke to his first wife, Maggie. In the midst of his writing, a bitter legal encounter with Norman Mailer involving the young writer Alan Lelchuk occurs, at the same time he develops a friendship with the important Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, who admired Roth’s rewrite of Kafka, The Breast. But he also experiences sustained criticism from Irving Howe which he never forgot. Roth unexpectedly changes publishers leaving Random House for Holt with a new editor and soon-to-be friend, Aaron Asher.

Introduction

This chapter recounts the origins of Philip Roth’s lifelong discontent associated with personal and professional betrayals. Publishers, parents, and his psychiatrist contributed to his understanding life as “a perpetual crisis,” as he writes in The Counterlife. At least once a decade he encountered a major challenge. As he noted in an essay, what character in a literary work does not have an element of anger or displeasure? The first word of the Iliad is “rage.” For Roth, hatred soon became his catalyst for living, although he often attempted to defuse anger into self-sabotage and mischief. Comedy, however, soon became his response to his own intensity.

“Psychoanalysis and Laxatives,” or Democracy in America

Roth and misogyny, highlighted by attacks by Vivian Gornick, Claire Bloom, and Carmen Callil initiate this chapter and its persistent question: did Roth treat women only as one-dimensional sex objects or as fully rounded personalities with agency and power? Roth’s response, in a series of private documents, argues that women, at least in his life, were always respected and treated equally. He itemizes the key women in his professional career, from his early agent Candida Donadio through such late friendships such as Janet Malcolm, Judith Thurman, Zadie Smith, and Nicole Krauss. The issue of Roth and his father and the writing of Patrimony and the function of writing in the midst of trauma expand the chapter, plus his unparalleled productivity in the 1990s. The focus is on Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theater, and the American Trilogy—all this against the background of untangling himself from Claire Bloom, complicated by illness and depression. The impact and misrepresentations in Bloom’s Leaving a Doll’s House, however, complicated by Roth’s contradictory behavior with Bloom, created difficulties, personally and professionally. The increasing presence of death in his writing noted in Sabbath’s Theater and I Married a Communist shape the final pages as Roth’s evolving American identity comes into focus.

An Education in Intensity

The chapter opens with Roth’s 1959 marriage to Margaret (Maggie) Williams, a divorced mother of two from the Midwest Roth met at the University of Chicago. The impact of the marriage on his self-esteem and mental health, and its effect on his early efforts to shape his developing publishing career, receives special attention. But at the same time, while facing personal challenges, he appeared in the Paris Review, began a new friendship with its editor, George Plimpton, and oversaw the appearance of his first book, Goodbye, Columbus. A year in Rome on a fellowship and a new publisher (Random House replacing Houghton Mifflin) furthered his advances, while he also began to teach at the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writers’ Workshop and then Princeton. New friendships with William Styron and Donald Klopfer of Random House, and work with his early editor Joe Fox, soon shaped the direction of his writing. He also started psychoanalysis, necessary to maintain his mental balance as the relationship with Maggie unraveled and a divorce proved to be impossible. The chapter also examines the reception of his first novel, Letting Go.

Quintet, or The Jersey Style

Roth’s late re-creation of the past, from Everyman to Nemesis is the focus of the chapter which begins with the causes for his look back and the emergence of a sustained melancholic tone to his writing presented in shorter fictions. The development of a “Jersey style” soon appears in his late works, preferring transparency and direct language instead of the embellished, piled-on prose of syntactic complexity seen earlier. An important discussion of The Plot Against America and its meaning for Roth and his readers shapes the center of the chapter, with a focus on children in the novel, equal in importance to its politics. His relationship with a new companion assisted in completing the novel, although he was constantly challenged by severe back pain which led to a back operation on 2002; heart problems requiring a series of stents also arose. And friends were dying: Bellow in 2005, Styron in 2006, Kitaj in 2007, and his brother in 2009. A consideration of the last three novels—Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis—precedes commentary on Roth’s final preparation of materials for his official biographer.

Portnoy: “Let It Rip”

The publication of Portnoy’s Complaint and how it overturned Roth’s life is the focus of Chapter Five. His response to the overwhelming publicity, attention, and money led to his retreat from city life, first to Woodstock, New York, and than Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut where he bought an 18th-century home. He was suddenly a celebrity but wanted none of it. Yet the attention prevented him from getting on with new work as he turned to satire, notably Our Gang, The Breast and The Great American Novel , dealing with Nixon, Kafka and baseball. Nevertheless, Portnoy had a serious impact on American writing and behavior discussed in the chapter.

Supercarnal Productions

Anchoring this chapter is Philip Roth’s London life with Bloom and a set of new friends: Al Alvarez, critic, Harold Pinter, playwright, R. B. Kitaj, painter, Michael Herr, journalist, and Edna O’Brien, novelist. Roth enjoyed a culturally rich and satisfying life with Bloom, while working on The Professor of Desire. But he soon sensed the fraying of his relationship as Bloom became increasingly dependent on her daughter, the opera singer Anna Steiger. He soon began to work on adaptations, principally for Bloom but also for himself: one early attempt was his effort to adapt Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, her Gulag autobiography. Another, new development was Roth’s involvement with Janet Hobhouse, novelist, their affair transposed to The Counterlife. And by the late 1970s, Roth turned to the experiences of an isolated writer in the countryside and the impact of the Holocaust through the possible afterlife of Anne Frank expressed in The Ghost Writer. Roth’s relationship with the New Yorker editor Veronica Geng and the continued importance of his editor Aaron Asher are also formidable figures. Comments on Roth’s enigmatic relationship with his mother (who died suddenly in 1981) end the chapter but not before a detailed accounting of Roth’s many illnesses (including a 1989 quintuple bypass) and the debilitating impact of illness on his physical and mental health.

Coda: “It’s a Miserable Life”

This chapter begins with Roth’s comic assessment of his own career as an author shared with a young writer and then analyzes his final volume, the essay collection Why Write? It then examines how he spent his time after he gave up writing fiction, while noting his final public reading on 8 May 2014 in New York. His death in New York on 22 May 2018 and the international reaction to the news follows. His funeral at Bard College in May 2018 and his memorial service held at the New York Public Library on 25 September 2018 were occasions to honor and remember the writer. His efforts to complete his personal story, even from the grave, via instructions to his biographer and others. He always meant to be in control.

Thinking in Straight Lines

“Thinking in Straight Lines:” Roth in the 1980s was knocked about by health, and his strained relationship with Bloom, became restless with England and began to question his identity, which found expression in The Counterlife, as experimental in form as in its story. Collectively, these events prevented any “straight thinking.” The chapter also narrates the growing role of Nathan Zuckerman in his writing, plus Roth’s friendships (and then nonfriendships) with James Atlas and Ross Miller, his first official biographer (later fired), and his longtime friend Theodore Solotaroff. The centrality of The Anatomy Lesson from 1983, focusing on pain and healing, receives extended discussion. Three years later Roth, with his friend David Plante, visit Israel, an experience that reappears in Operation Shylock. During this time, Roth signs with the ambitious literary agent Andrew Wylie and through him renews several mega literary deals reestablishing Roth’s financial clout. Other topics include Roth’s meaningful friendship with Primo Levi, interviewed in 1986 (and dead the following year) and the increasing role of mortality in his writing, intensified by the death of his father in 1989 and then the publication of Patrimony in 1991.

“Walked Out on the Platinum!,” or New York, New York

This chapter looks at Roth’s discontent with the promotion and distribution of his first and second novels, his legal separation from the intractable Maggie, his decision to shift editors at Random House from Joe Fox to Jason Epstein after the poor reception of When She Was Good, and his constant search for success. Also covered are the growing importance to Roth of psychoanalysis and his special relationship with his therapist, who publicly discussed Roth in a 1967 article without the writer’s permission. Roth’s reaction was scathing. A new style emerged, seen in a series of short stories and excerpts from his new work with titles like “Whacking Off.” Alimony and the absence of financial security were burdens. Roth began a new relationship, with the socialite Ann Mudge, the antithesis of Maggie: refined, educated, poised, and supportive.