Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  Deception, published in 1990, is an offshoot of The Counterlife. It even presents itself as a notebook for The Counterlife, recording conversations between the author and several women with whom he has had affairs—a Czech émigrée, a former student, a close friend now stricken with cancer—but focusing on the unhappily married English mistress who became the novel’s Maria Freshfield. The affair between these two is happening in the present, and most of their easy-flowing talk seems to be taking place postcoitally (or, when it’s particularly inspirational, pre-re-coitally), even though the book, which is written entirely in dialogue, contains almost no mention of body parts or physical acts. The atmosphere, the characters, and the metaphysical puzzle of a plot emerge from the sparest materials a novelist can use. No exposition, very little description, not even any “he said, she said” to clarify who is speaking: just the voices. (“I’m an écouteur,” the protagonist says, “a talk fetishist.”) Deception might be called a play rather than a novel—one critic referred to Pinter’s Betrayal, on a similar subject, while another, noting the scarcity even of stage directions, called it a radio play. Roth has said that he was feeling his way back to fiction in the conversations between Zuckerman and Maria in the later pages of The Facts, and the reader can sense the connection with those pages, not only in the lovers’ playfulness but in Roth’s evident delight at the rekindling of his imagination.

  Imagination—undermining reality, amplifying reality—is as much the book’s subject as adultery. The principal love affair takes place in the small Notting Hill studio of a writer called Philip, who has written novels about a fictional writer called Zuckerman. The conversations range widely, from the woman’s marital dissatisfactions and Philip’s adventures in Prague to British anti-Americanism. (At a dinner in “London’s highest literary circles,” an unnamed Englishman has been railing at Philip about the horrors supported by “‘your president.’”) This Philip is married, however, a detail that creates a problem when the “notebook” is discovered by his wife. In tears, she accuses him of going off to his studio every day not just to write but to meet women. And he attempts to calm her by explaining that these “women” are fictional characters, that the conversations are exercises for a novel, and that the English mistress who “sounds so fucking well born” (in his wife’s words) is based on a woman he had an affair with in New York, before he ever met his wife. As for calling the protagonist “Philip,” he explains, this is nothing more than a literary strategy, a method of self-implication that gets his creative juices flowing. Initially, at least, she isn’t convinced:

  “You love her more than you ever loved me!”

  “Because she doesn’t exist. If you didn’t exist I’d love you like that too.”

  The logic is irresistible. And then she is put in the position of seeming not only a jealous wife but a literary philistine if she insists that everything she has read is “real.” The wife doesn’t know what to believe, and neither do we—although we both have our suspicions of being masterfully played.

  Roth and Claire Bloom were not actually married when this book was written, and many readers who rejected the literary argument for Philip’s calling himself “Philip,” and assumed that the book was autobiographical, also assumed that the beautiful English actress (who sounded so fucking well born) was his model for the mistress, not the wife. Bloom herself did not see it this way when Roth showed her the manuscript—as he showed her all his manuscripts—a few weeks after he finished it. The reason was obvious. Not only was the husband in the manuscript named Philip; the wife was named Claire. Roth went out immediately after giving it to her and called his good friend Judith Thurman, who had already read it and had strongly advised him to cut the name “Claire.” Now he asked her, “What should I do?” Thurman tells me that she remembers her response quite clearly: “Meet me on Fifty-seventh Street with a credit card.” They didn’t find anything at Tiffany’s, but at Bulgari he purchased a spectacular gold-and-emerald snake ring, just in case Bloom reacted the way that any woman in the situation would react.

  In her memoir, Bloom recounts her fury and their confrontation over what seemed to her an outrageous insult. But after Roth’s apparently brief and entirely unsuccessful attempt at a literary justification (it involved “the richness of the texture”), they made their peace. He agreed to delete her name; Bloom accepted the jewelry. Still, in some ways Roth had won this bizarre literary game of betrayal in plain sight: Bloom writes that Maria Freshfield, in The Counterlife—and, by extension, the woman in Deception—was based on “the beautiful, gifted novelist Janet Hobhouse, with whom Philip, the year before we met, had had a brief and intense relationship.” She doesn’t say what her conclusion was about the other women—fact or fiction—and since she was the only person with a reason to care about the distinction, why should we? The words the women are made of remain the same. Yet the question of intent—whether we believe his authorial excuses, whether the women are meant to be real—makes the book feel like one of Escher’s impossible constructions. On how many levels does Deception deceive?

  To help us make up our minds, toward the end of the book, Philip receives a phone call from his mistress, some years after their affair has ended. He has moved back to America. She has read his recently published novel, clearly The Counterlife, in which she figures as a major character—“I don’t think Freshfield was at all a good name for me”—and she is torn between being upset because he has stolen her words and being miffed because she isn’t receiving credit for them. She, too, refuses to swallow any of the “highbrow nonsense” that he offers about the deeper realities of fiction:

  “As I made you up, you never existed.”

  “Then who was that in your studio with my legs over your shoulders?”

  She threatens to get even by writing a book of her own, about him—odd that Roth didn’t give this plan to the wife; here reality outdistanced even his imagination—and he replies that he may write another book about her, incorporating the very scene we happen to be reading. It’s ingenious, but it can also be maddening, depending on one’s appetite for ingenuity and the lively music of Roth’s crossing voices. This vocal tirelessness reminded Updike, for one, of Bach. “You see Roth as a musician in this book,” he said of Deception, in a comment in Maclean’s: “It’s tempting to see his work as variations on what seem to some people not enough themes. But you have to admire the way he sticks to his themes and, like Bach, does one more turn through his obsessions.”

  Some of these obsessions—British anti-Semitism, for example—were already too outworn to be brought to anything resembling life. He made up for this somewhat with the freshness of his jubilation at being back among the Jews of New York—“the real obstreperous Zion”—with their unapologetic forcefulness, their elbows on the table, their impudence. Deception is also notable for the emergence of what, if it is not another obsession, is certainly Roth’s recognition of a new and significant opposition. Here, in the midst of so many female voices—the mistress’s voice is particularly witty and intelligent, more so than Maria’s in The Counterlife—there appears out of nowhere a little courtroom scene in which the writer-protagonist is in the dock. Instead of a rabbi or a judge demanding to know whether he would have written his books in Nazi Germany, however, a female prosecutor is charging him with “sexism, misogyny, woman abuse, slander of women, denigration of women, defamation of women, and ruthless seduction.” The questions to be answered now are: “Why did you portray Mrs. Portnoy as a hysteric? Why did you portray Lucy Nelson as a psychopath? Why did you portray Maureen Tarnopol as a liar and a cheat?” And, ultimately, “Why do you depict women as shrews, if not to malign them?” His crimes, he is warned, carry severe penalties.

  It should be clear by now that Roth, when attacked, prefers to goad rather than retreat: to make mischief, to get adrenaline flowing. He is a great explainer, though, and “Philip” makes a pass at defending himself through a question of his own: “Why do you, may I ask, take the dep
iction of one woman as a depiction of all women?” He makes a vague attempt to distinguish politics from literature, an attempt that is quickly dismissed. He gets off a couple of good jokes, as when he points out that Shakespeare also depicted a shrew, and the prosecutor upbraids him for comparing himself to Shakespeare: “Next you will be comparing yourself to Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker!” But the satire, which inevitably ends with the defendant sexually provoking the nonplussed prosecutor (“Help, help, he’s exploiting me, he’s degrading me”), seems a throwback to the comic book silliness of Roth’s old Nixon jokes, or even the Bucknell satire that got him hauled before the dean of men. Kid stuff, as gleefully taunting as he could make it: he even addresses the prosecutor as “girl.”

  The adrenaline was flowing now. Fay Weldon, a writer known for her feminist convictions, gave Deception a nearly rapturous review in The New York Times Book Review, calling it a “swift, elegant, disturbing novel” and placing Roth alongside Thomas Pynchon at the forefront of contemporary writing. It was “O.K. by me,” she said, that Roth was “rather old-fashioned about women,” particularly in a novel about seduction that uses language so seductively. (“And there we are, writer and reader both,” she wrote, “fulfilled in post-coital languor.”) Yet she concluded by skewering the finale of the trial scene and by quoting it—or the parts of it that seemed “over the edge” of the literary—“as my revenge, on behalf of all those women whom Roth in his novels has indeed exploited, degraded and defamed.” In the daily Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wondered if Roth, seeking to emulate the heroic rebelliousness of the Eastern European writers he admired, hadn’t “turned a woman into his longed-for totalitarian state.” And in the London Review of Books, Julian Symons started right in by characterizing Roth as a writer whose “women are hardly more than receptacles for semen, emotional punching-bags or ministering angels.” Case closed.

  The cover of the book probably didn’t help. Simon and Schuster, Roth’s new publisher, made news when it bought Roth away from Farrar, Straus and Giroux with a $1.8 million contract—negotiated by Roth’s new agent, Andrew Wylie—for three books, beginning with Deception. Roth is openly grateful to the editors he has worked with over the years—Joe Fox, Aaron Asher, and Veronica Geng are names that he mentions often—and one reason for making the move was that his editor at the time, David Rieff, was leaving for a career in journalism. (Roth tells me that he read the whole of The Counterlife aloud to Rieff one long night, when he had the feeling that something was wrong with the book, “and whenever the sentence was weak, one or the other of us rang the gong, so to speak.”) But it was also true that, in his late fifties, he felt pressed to earn more money. His books had always sold respectably, but even the most critically acclaimed novels he had published in the past decade or so—The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife—had hardly been bestsellers. Roth recalls virtually begging Roger Straus to increase his advances so that he wouldn’t have to change publishers, and Straus’s reply: “You don’t earn it back.” But Simon and Schuster had a plan for making Roth a more commercial author: the cover of Deception was an artfully blurry photograph of a couple in bed, the man’s hand holding the woman just above the odalisque curve of her hip, registering somewhere between a romance novel and soft porn.

  The publisher was openly attempting to recover the scandalous momentum of Roth’s earlier years: “to get across the sexiness of the book,” a Simon and Schuster official told the Times, “and link it to ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’” Roth—who had been fleeing the Portnoy image for years—hated the cover but felt that he “had to yield to the publisher,” something that, he says, he never did again. (Roth moved on to another publisher, Houghton Mifflin, after this contract was up, and he remained there.) In any case, the cover and the accompanying ad campaign failed to have the desired effect. Deception was not a commercial success. But even before it appeared, Roth was working on another book.

  Herman Roth died in October 1989 at eighty-eight, not quite three months after Roth underwent emergency bypass surgery. Roth hid the fact that he was having surgery from his ailing father, telling him that he’d be out of touch for a few days, attending a conference at Yale. In the new book, Roth describes the old man, who learned the truth a few days later, as both angry and near tears because he had not been told about the surgery and had been unable to help, crying, “I should have been there!” And Roth explains that he felt much the same way during his weeks of convalescence, praying—to his father—“Don’t die until I get my strength back. Don’t die until I can do it right.” Roth had only recently been allowed to start driving again when, one night in late October, he was awakened by a phone call. He hurried to the New Jersey hospital where his father had been taken to the emergency room. Roth had been writing about his father since the brain tumor was diagnosed; he completed Patrimony in the months immediately after his father’s death.

  It’s difficult to imagine two works by a single writer that are more different—never mind two works written back to back—than the clever, evasive, cloud-borne Deception and Patrimony, a work of nonfiction (it’s subtitled A True Story) that is earnest, straightforward, and unsparingly emotional. No fancy writing, no formal games. Here is the level, unadorned voice familiar from the early sections of The Facts—Roth without a mask—given weight and urgency by the life that the author feels compelled to record and preserve. Readers had been getting fictionalized glimpses of Herman Roth for years. (“It’s virtually impossible for me to keep him out of a book I write,” Roth told an interviewer on French TV; “I have to lock all the doors and put the furniture up against them to keep him out.”) Now, at last, we had a full-length portrait from life, intensely loving but never sentimental.

  The retired insurance man with an eighth-grade education, who made a life for his family out of sheer dutifulness and what Roth calls “spirited decency,” was also stubborn, obsessive, crude, and unwittingly cruel in his compulsion to correct other people—a man whose admonitions became so ruthless in his later years that Roth’s mother thought about divorcing him. (That revelation is almost as much of a shock to the reader as it must have been to Roth.) For Roth, who details his youthful yearning to replace his shamefully undereducated father with someone more dignified, his father now appeared to be the source not only of his personal strength but of his strength as a writer. “He taught me the vernacular. He was the vernacular, unpoetic and expressive and point-blank, with all the vernacular’s glaring limitations and all its durable force.”

  As autobiography, Patrimony scatters light on some of Roth’s earlier works. Here is Herman Roth’s account of his father beating one of Herman’s brothers, to keep him from marrying “a worldly woman,” adapted in Portnoy; here is a boyhood friend named Lenny Lonoff. More important, this unflinching book inaugurates the subjects of illness and death, which take on hurricane force in Roth’s later work. Yet very little surpasses the poignancy of a scene in which Herman Roth bargains with a surgeon for “another couple of years” and then, within minutes, expands the request to “just another three or four years.” Roth, sitting by his father’s side, recognizes his overwhelming desire—tempered only by the fear of seeming greedy and calling down a worse fate—to out-and-out demand “another eighty-six years!” There is, too, the excruciating frankness with which Roth observes his father on a bright summer day, surrounded by his family, yet “utterly isolated within a body that had become a terrifying escape-proof enclosure, the holding pen in a slaughterhouse.”

  On a happier note, Patrimony anticipates Roth’s future books because Herman Roth’s story is so much a story about America: “All the time I’m thinking that the real work, the invisible, huge job that he did all his life, that that whole generation of Jews did, was making themselves American. The best citizens.”

  Although the sophisticated writer hardly resembles the insurance salesman, there are many instances in which Roth seems also to be writing about himself: stories of Herman Roth’s zest, his discipline, his dog
gedness, “the hypnotic hold that the mundane destiny of an ordinary immigrant family seemed still to have on him,” as it does on the author of this book. “You mustn’t forget anything—that’s the inscription on his coat of arms,” Roth writes about the father he has resurrected with such meticulous care, thought by thought, year by year. “To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory.”

  Although he suffered nightmares about his father for some time afterward, Roth’s heart surgery renewed his hold on life. “I was so happy,” he says. “I was free of this time bomb that had been ticking in my chest.” He was suddenly much stronger, and everything seemed possible, including marriage. In April 1990, after more than fourteen years together, Roth and Bloom were married in the Upper West Side apartment of their friend Barbara Epstein, the co-editor of The New York Review of Books—the same apartment where Roth had chased Jules Feiffer around in a mad pre-Portnoy improvisation years before. Not all the omens were encouraging. It was Bloom who proposed marriage, and it took him three weeks to respond; his previous experience with divorce led him to insist on a prenuptial agreement, which she agreed to sign only two days before the wedding; unbeknownst to Bloom, he’d been having an affair for years with a married Connecticut neighbor; and he had written Deception. Yet it seemed that he loved her, they were imaginatively well matched, and he wanted the marriage to work. Or it was the beginning of the end.

  Professionally, he was undoubtedly regaining his strength. Patrimony, published in 1991, received superlative reviews, even from critics who’d had trouble with his other recent work. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani noted approvingly that the book “eschews the defensive mirror games the author likes to play with fact and fiction” and offered, instead, “a new directness and tenderness of emotion”; she called it “one of Mr. Roth’s most powerful books yet.” Contrary to his custom, Roth went on a nationwide reading tour and was particularly happy to appear at Bucknell, at a reading held in honor of (and in the presence of) his beloved teacher Mildred Martin, whom he had visited almost every spring for years. (“She was the fairest person I’ve ever known,” Roth says of Martin today. “She had wit, and she was dead serious about educating us.”) And he began working on a book that he felt certain was the best he’d ever done: a kind of capstone to the period that had begun with Portnoy, his ultimate book about the Jews.