Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  The character Philip Roth does arrive at some conclusions. Coming down from his “Easter Parade” high, he dismisses Diasporism as “thinly camouflaged anti-Zionist crap.” He takes up the offer to work as an Israeli spy—going to Athens and then to another, unnamed European city on a dangerous mission, although he does so mostly for the excitement it will add to the book. This information brings us full circle, back to the straight-faced statements of the preface and to the book’s subtitle, A Confession. But the account of this adventure, we are told, which made up the original final chapter of the book—it was titled “Operation Shylock,” the code name of the mission—had to be deleted because of the threat it posed to Israeli security and to other agents in the field. Instead of the dynamic conclusion toward which the story has been building, we get an epilogue, set nearly five years later, that depicts a meeting between the protagonist and his Mossad handler, over plates of chopped herring at an Upper West Side eatery, in which Roth is threatened and cajoled—“Call it fiction instead. Append a note: ‘I made this up’”—and finally paid off, with a great quantity of cash, for omitting the ending of his book. This is now the ending of the book—except for an appended “Note to the Reader” that begins, “This book is a work of fiction.” With the sole exceptions of the excerpts from the Appelfeld interview and some “verbatim minutes” of the Demjanjuk trial, any resemblance to living people or actual events “is entirely coincidental.” The note concludes, “This confession is false.”

  The flesh-and-blood Roth was so delighted by the giddy pleasures of this fact-and-fiction game that he continued to talk up the spy story in an unblinkingly ingenuous interview with The New York Times, on the book’s release, in 1993. (“I added the note to the reader as I was asked to do. I’m just a good Mossadnik.”) This was his full-out return to fiction, and he was expecting a big reaction: he was very happy with the book. (“I felt like I was dancing as a writer,” he tells me, about the experience of writing it.) He seemed to be happy, period. Bloom had just turned sixty-two, and he gave a big party for her in Connecticut. He himself was turning sixty; there was a party for that, too, given by his former doctor and closest Connecticut friend, C. H. Huvelle. An early review of the book by Paul Gray, in Time magazine, was ecstatic (“Roth has not riffed with quite this comic abandon since Portnoy’s Complaint”), and Time began to put together a cover story. It was canceled, however, when less enthusiastic reviews began to come in.

  The most influential critics tore into the book, in great part, for not being a more traditional novel. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani noted that the sheer amount of talk (“and talk and talk and talk”), however brilliant, threw the book off balance and undermined the plot; “one somehow expects a novel to be more shapely and selective.” She found that Roth was prevented from engaging with outside issues by an all too familiar “solipsism, repetitiveness and obsessive self-interest.” And, not surprisingly—given her praise of Patrimony for its lack of “defensive mirror games”—she had no patience for “the author’s tiresome games with mirrors.” In the Times Book Review, D. M. Thomas was generally positive, but his praise was buried amid plot details and qualified by a complaint that the subordinate characters lacked independent life. Toughest of all was John Updike in The New Yorker, offering broad praise (“as painstakingly written as it is elaborately developed”) but hitting hard at the same frustrations the others had expressed: “The characters turn out to be talking heads, faces attached to tirades,” the book was “an orgy of argumentation,” and it didn’t seem to matter to Roth whether the arguments were good or bad, heartfelt or perverse or frivolous. The structure, too, was dubious: like Deception, it seemed to have been assembled out of monologues and interviews. Some readers already felt that Roth’s recent books contained too much Roth, Updike charged—Updike was clearly among them—but Operation Shylock contained too much of everything. Roth, as an author, had become exhausting.

  This had to hurt. Whatever Roth thought about the capacities of professional reviewers, he had an unflagging respect for Updike’s opinion. They had developed a friendly acquaintance over the years, starting when they were young and full of plans and arguing about the Vietnam War. (Roth tells me that one of their arguments, somewhat transmogrified, made it into Rabbit Redux, with Updike—a defender of the war—in the role of the politically conservative Rabbit, and Roth’s views emerging from a black revolutionary character called Skeeter.) Roth and Bloom had gone to dinner at the Updikes’ house, near Boston, when Bloom was performing there. (Roth was mightily impressed by the layout of the house, with separate rooms for Updike’s various projects—novels, poetry, reviews—and a typewriter in each one.) Roth didn’t write reviews, but he telephoned Updike whenever he admired something, and Updike—who Roth says generally stayed aloof—would occasionally write him a note. In assessing his generation of writers, Roth often says that Updike had the greatest natural gift of all of them.

  There was some consolation, a few months later, in a strongly positive (if not very influentially placed) review by Janis Freedman Bellow, in the Boston University alumni magazine, Bostonia, defending Roth against the charges of solipsism and emphasizing his engagement with his subject. The author was Saul Bellow’s fifth and final wife; a graduate student when she met her future husband, she had recently completed a doctorate in French literature at the University of Chicago. She was outraged by the negative reviews of Operation Shylock, and Bellow had encouraged her to write a review of her own. Bellow also felt the book had been “unfairly manhandled by the press,” as he told the Chicago Tribune the following spring, mentioning that he was teaching it in a course at Boston University, on “living writers I find especially interesting.” Also consoling, Operation Shylock won the PEN/Faulkner Award that spring for the best novel of the year.

  In responding to accusations of solipsism, Roth has often tried to explain the meaning that the use of his name in his books had for him at the time. For years, he’d been fascinated by European novelists (Genet, Céline, Gombrowicz) who, casting themselves as characters in their fiction, reveled in pointing a finger not at the sins of fictional others but at themselves—a method Roth describes as “I’m in the broiler, watch me broil.” (As far back as The Professor of Desire, in the Prague-inflected seventies, an angry young writer makes a case against “that holy of holies” Chekhov: “Why is the brute never Anton but some other slob?”) When he began writing Deception, a novel about adultery, he thought it would be enlivening for everyone—for him, for readers—if the leading character was not a randomly named protagonist but him. He explains, “If I say that I am the one putting my hand on the girl, that I am cheating … there’s something at stake.”

  It seems clear, too, that in the post-Halcion years of questioning identity, drawing on real names gave him an extra charge. The names of the women in The Facts were changed before publication to protect their privacy—and “because I didn’t want to read them in reviews,” Roth adds—but it was important to writing the book that the real names were in place. In the case of Operation Shylock, a spinning dreidel of identities, Roth reports that all the “doubles” books he read before he started writing—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Secret Sharer—left him feeling that the modern reader could be drawn in further if, again, the doubled figure was Roth himself. He sees the current memoir craze as the “vulgarized version of a real modernist need.” Which he sums up as: “You must be Raskolnikov. I am Pipik.”

  In December 1992, a few months before Operation Shylock was published, Roth began to experience a recurrence of back pain. He was on a reading tour for Patrimony, visiting universities and cultural centers around the country; he took to wearing a back brace during the ninety-minute readings and to downing a couple of shots of vodka afterward to ease the pain. He recalls that sometimes it got so bad that, between cities, he had to lie down on the airport floor. Despite the mood of happiness at his sixtieth birthday party, that March, several photographs show him clutching his ba
ck. It was becoming clear by then that Operation Shylock was not going to be the big critical and commercial success that he had hoped for. But even that disappointment was overshadowed by the pain, although the pain may have made the disappointment harder to bear. By May, when he received an honorary degree from Amherst, he was barely able to drive home. That summer, he had to stop working on the new book that he had begun, because he could neither sit nor stand at his desk with any comfort. After months without substantive relief, and unable to work, he began to plummet emotionally. He recalls that it was only his fear of the snapping turtles and the water snakes in his pond in Connecticut that kept him from throwing himself in.

  It isn’t a joke, or a metaphor. In the summer of 1993, a suicidal depression began to close in on him, as deep and frightening as the Halcion-fueled breakdown five years earlier. He feared that the physical pain would never go away. In his own words, from a private account he wrote later, he was experiencing “the most unimaginable form of dread I had ever known, there waiting for you when you opened your eyes in the morning, there when you tried unsuccessfully to get to sleep at night.” It felt as though “a trap door opens within you,” the account goes on. “And you are utterly defenseless in another world—you are dropped into the nether region of your worst dead-of-night fears.” He was then living in Connecticut, as he always did in summertime. Bloom, in her memoir, writes that he seemed “afraid of being alone with me” and that, very soon, he did not want her there at all. Sandy came to stay for a while, and the brothers returned together to Sandy’s home in Chicago for about ten days. When the suicidal thoughts did not abate, Roth called his doctor, who arranged to have him admitted to a psychiatric hospital, Silver Hill, in New Canaan, Connecticut. He flew back east again right away.

  He entered the hospital in early August and remained for seventeen days, then returned to the house. Bloom was away, at his request, but close friends came to stay with him. When he felt himself sinking again, in early September, he readmitted himself for another stay of approximately the same length. He was taking an anti-inflammatory drug for his back pain and medication for depression. By the time that he was released, for good, in late September, he was feeling not only better but revitalized, free of pain for the first time in three-quarters of a year. He now views the depression as having been an excruciating process of mental clarification, letting him see what he needed and wanted for the rest of his life. “It was dreadful to have lived through, yet it turned out to be a merciful affliction.” He returned to New York directly from the hospital and, within hours, resumed work on the new novel. The following month, he filed for divorce.

  He speaks of experiencing a sense of great relief. He had managed not to kill himself. The illness had been overwhelming; so was health. The anti-inflammatory medication kept his back pain at bay, and the other drugs were not needed for long. And he was free. Free of a woman who, as he says now, had seemed too often unsupportive through his months of pain and fear—Bloom herself writes, with regret, that her “panic” had made her appear “lacking in compassion”—and whose vulnerability (as Bloom also saw it) had become a burden; free of a companion who had become a living distraction from work that had never felt more pressing. In The Counterlife, Nathan Zuckerman observes that the most Jewish thing about his brother, Henry, is that he had to move to Israel and learn Hebrew and rediscover his God—all these morally irreproachable things—in order to justify leaving his wife. Roth’s depression was no less harrowing and real for having provided a similar justification.

  Bloom did not legally fight the prenup, in exchange for a comparatively modest settlement of a hundred thousand dollars. To judge from her memoir, it seems that both of them, at least intermittently, imagined that they would remain friends. Yet this period could not always have been as easy for Roth as he claims: for a while he thought of selling his beloved country house and building a new one nearby, just to get away from disturbing memories; he went as far as commissioning an architect and having a model built, although he eventually gave it up. He was living alone in the New York apartment, working in his studio every day, and at night either seeing friends for dinner or—the kind of detail he can’t resist throwing in—glued to the O. J. Simpson trial. The new book was coming along with astonishing ease. He felt that the writing was energized by his return to life, even though the book was about grief, loss, and the art of dying.

  Nobody Beloved Gets Out Alive

  “It began because I was looking for a place to be buried,” Roth explains about writing Sabbath’s Theater, in his Web of Stories interview. He was nearing sixty and, he thought, “I’d better take care of that.” The search was set off by the death of his friend and former lover Janet Hobhouse, in 1991. She was forty-two. Ovarian cancer. They had been lovers for a brief time in 1974, when she lived upstairs from him in an apartment building on East Eighty-first Street, in New York. (In The Counterlife, Maria lives upstairs from Nathan; he calls the elevator their “deus ex machina.”) Hobhouse was beautiful and gifted, as Bloom wrote in her memoir; she was also married. Although she was born in New York, she had spent years in England, and Roth liked her accent. Beyond a few deliberate and deceptive touches, she wasn’t Maria Freshfield, of course—she was the alibi for the woman who was Maria Freshfield—but she was undoubtedly the woman who talks about her chemotherapy in Deception. (“I may be bald but I’m not even forty. I really don’t think I should die.”)

  Hobhouse wrote about Roth, too, in a memoir-like novel titled The Furies—it began as a memoir—in which Roth, renamed Jack, figures as a romantic artist-hero, all coiled energy and liquid black eyes. Hobhouse was clearly in love but not blindly so: she frankly assesses the contrast between the “extremeness” of her lover’s fiction and the “old-maidish Prufrockery” of his cautious, self-protective ways. (This is a discrepancy that all of Roth’s friends observe: the literary pirate who carries a bottle of Purell.) When she revealed that a psychiatrist had prescribed lithium for her, he backed away. She sensed his fear of getting entangled with another unbalanced woman, even if she didn’t know his history. But she did not see the contrast between his work and his life as diminishing; to the contrary, she wrote that it made her love him more. This was how the work got done. “I admired his fasting.”

  Hobhouse died before The Furies was published. Much of the book revolves around her mother, a troubled woman who had committed suicide a few years earlier. Hobhouse had buried her in a Revolutionary-era cemetery in Cornwall, Connecticut, near Roth’s home, with the understanding that she would be buried there, too. The sad task of getting this done fell to Roth, who also acquired the stone for her grave. Hence the idea of finding his own cemetery plot, an adventure that Roth has recounted to friends and interviewers alike, con brio. First, he imagined himself in the same bucolic country cemetery, “but I just thought I wouldn’t be comfortable there,” he says. “Aside from my friend, I thought, who would I talk to?” He dismissed several other nearby places for similar reasons, then went to look at the New Jersey cemetery where his parents are buried, but none of the adjacent plots were available. The cemetery warden walked him around, looking for a suitable location, but when Roth pointed toward a plot not far from his parents, the man—“a real comedian,” Roth says—shook his head: “I don’t like that for you, Mr. Roth. There’s not enough legroom.” By then the authorial impulse had kicked in. “It began to dawn on me,” he says, “that someone who’s looking for a grave to be buried in might be interesting—especially if he’s going to commit suicide.”

  It is tempting to say that Roth drew Mickey Sabbath out of his depression, when only the fear of snapping turtles and water snakes kept him from throwing himself into his pond; and out of the powerful sense of life that swept over him when he managed not to do it—or, rather, the powerful sense of life that had kept him from doing it all along, no matter how awful his fear and despair. Sabbath’s Theater is Roth’s most emotionally intense book, a book that seems to be running a fever. It
is also a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature: coursing with life, dense with character and wisdom, it gives the deepest experiences we face—dying, remembering, holding on to each other—the startling impact of first knowledge, first incredulous awareness. Roth accomplishes this largely by avoiding expectations. Sabbath’s Theater is deliberately abrasive and insanely funny—even more than in Operation Shylock, Roth shocks us into feelings that pieties could not induce. For all its laughs, the book is essentially a tragedy, and filled with tears. It brings us smack up against our most terrible losses and our utterly useless outrage at the fact of our extinction—at the fact that, as Mickey Sabbath says, “There’s nothing on earth that keeps its promise.”

  Mickey Sabbath is not Zuckerman, not Kepesh, and not Philip Roth. In terms of simple biography, he is a few years older than these fellows and has had nothing like their academic backgrounds. Sabbath was a sailor in his youth: he shipped out as a merchant seaman at seventeen, directly after high school, in 1946, and what he remembers best about the ports and the towns and the experiences is the whores. (“Particularly fond of whores. The stewlike stink of those oniony parts. What has ever meant more to me?”) Much of Sabbath’s pungent history—“Bahia, where there was a church and a whorehouse for every day of the year”—Roth got from the sailor past and sexual lore of his expatriate painter friend in London, R. B. Kitaj. He had little feeling for Kitaj’s painting, and Kitaj’s frequent Jewish subject matter did not reflect the kind of Jewishness that was meaningful to Roth. (“He wanted to attach to Jews in a historical way, not in an everyday way,” Roth says, reflectively; “historical suffering and battles, but not ironing pants.”) Yet Roth listened devotedly to Kitaj’s tales of his exotic travels and his visits, during his teens, to the best and the lowest brothels from Buenos Aires to Havana. (Mickey Sabbath: “To be back there, to be seventeen in Havana and ramming it in!”)