In a 2008 radio interview Philip Roth, 75 at the time, remarked, “Biography gives a new dimension of terror to dying.” He’d been entertaining this terror for at least four years, since his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had announced in May 2004 that Roth’s longtime friend Ross Miller (playwright Arthur Miller’s nephew, and a professor at the University of Connecticut) had been signed to write his full-scale, authorized biography. But Miller, according to Roth’s best friend Benjamin Taylor, was “not up to the task”, and after five years of dithering, during which he’d managed to interview only about a dozen of Roth’s friends and associates, he was taken off the job. Their friendship was over, and Roth remained bitter about the split for the rest of his life. (Roth died in 2018.) “Ross was no villain, only a literary amateur,” Taylor writes in his memoir Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, “and it pained me to hear Philip go on about him as if he were Iago…. But the appetite for vengeance was insatiable. Philip could not get enough of getting even.” After considering a couple of other candidates – Hermione Lee, the acclaimed biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Stephen Zipperstein, a professor at Stanford (who didn’t want to do an authorized biography, and is going ahead on his own to write an unauthorized one) — Roth settled on Blake Bailey, whose biography of John Cheever had won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle award, among other accolades. Taylor told New York Times reporter Mark Oppenheimer, “I remember [Roth] saying to me, after reading the [Cheever] book, ‘He [Bailey] doesn’t judge his protagonist – he just lets him perform. Behave, misbehave, whatever he chooses to do. But there is no moral overlay…. That is the kind of moral latitude I need in a biography.'”  

Alas, all too much moral latitude, in the opinion of some reviewers of Philip Roth: The Biography. In The New Republic, Laura Marsh writes: “In Bailey, Roth found a biographer who is exceptionally attuned to his grievances and rarely challenges his moral accounting.” The pot, it turns out, was reluctant to call the kettle black, and Bailey is now facing his own moral accounting. Two women have accused him of rape, and some of his former female students at a middle-school in New Orleans claim that he routinely “groomed” them. Bailey has denied one of the rape accusations, but has admitted to the other, saying he stopped the assault when the woman told him she wasn’t using birth control. 

The response from the publishing world has been swift and decisive. His literary agent has dropped him, and W.W. Norton & Co. has halted further printing, shipping and promotion of the biography. (I got my review copy before the scandal broke.) The philandering Roth – his other (unauthorized) biographer, Ira Nadel, whose book is discussed in the companion piece to this review (The Heartbroken Patriot) counts 15 extra- and post-marital affairs Roth had with women, not including dalliances with a number of female students over the years – may indeed have found a kindred soul in Bailey. As Taylor tells us, “He was looking not for a Boswell to fix him to the page, but for a ventriloquist’s dummy to sit in his lap. It was really an impossible quest. He wanted someone first-rate he could entirely bend to his point of view.” Of course, one of the requirements of any first-rate biographer is the ability to resist the blandishments of their subject, and Bailey, like his hapless predecessor Miller, does not appear to have been up to the task either. Marsh has much to criticize in what she sees (and rightly, I think) as Bailey’s unsympathetic treatment of Roth’s first wife Maggie Martinson Williams, mother of two by her first husband, including this unsavory tidbit: 

 

One of the first things [Bailey] tells us about [Maggie] is that her vagina was “withered and discolored” from child-bearing, and that Roth was “frightened” to go down on her. [By his own account, Roth was an aficionado of cunnilingus.] Like an adoring wingman who thinks his friend can do better, Bailey expresses his concern that “an unemployed thirty-year-old former secretary and waitress” was “an unlikely consort for such a handsome and promising young man,” and notes the abundance of “gorgeous young women” whom Roth “longed to flirt with, if not for Maggie’s hawkish eye.”

 

It may be hard to quite reconcile the image of this master of cunnilingus with the very picture of a dutiful son, but so it was – not only in Bailey’s presentation of him, but also in Roth’s own writing and statements. Unlike the famous portrayal of the smothering Sophie Portnoy, the author’s account of his own mother, Bess, is consistently idealized, as in this remembrance from his 1981 eulogy of her (suggesting a Jewish version of the Victorian “angel in the house”):

 

Because she intended to live a worthy life, every morning and every day she went about the job of making order: order for a hard-working, exacting, ambitious husband; order for two temperamental, reflective, ambitious sons…. She proceeded with the meticulous precision that we more readily associate with cutting diamonds than with performing the relentless daily chores of ordinary family life. But the daily chores of ordinary family life were just that to her – precious jewels to be cut to perfection and given to those she loved.

 

This reverent portrait is confirmed by Roth’s friend Claudia Roth Pierpont (no relation) in her study Roth Unbound: A Writer and his Books: “He says that there is not a day that he doesn’t think of his mother or of something she said that seems to him wonderful. Not that she said anything exceptional. ‘It was just ordinary mothering,’ he says, ‘quite wonderful enough.'” 

The portrait of the father, as given by the son, is more extensive and clear-eyed, though always lovingly and respectfully offered up. In Patrimony, Herman, whose formal education never went beyond the eighth grade, comes off as overbearing, hypercritical, obnoxious and (to this reader at least) quite insufferable, but still admirable, in his way: 

 

He could never understand that a capacity for renunciation and iron self-discipline like his own was extraordinary and not an endowment shared by all. He figured if a man with all his handicaps and limitations had it in him, then anybody did. All that was required was willpower – as if willpower grew on trees. His unswerving dutifulness toward those for whom he was responsible seemed to compel him to respond to what he perceived as their failings as viscerally as he did to what he took…to be their needs. And because his was a peremptory personality, and because buried deep inside him was an unalloyed nugget of prehistoric ignorance as well, he had no idea just how unproductive, how maddening, even, at times, how cruel his admonishing could be.

 

“It was his father’s interference that he’d had to escape,” Pierpont tells us. “His mother was reticent by comparison, the family’s peacekeeper when the males went head-to-head.” Near the end of Herman’s life, when he was suffering from an incapacitating tumor on his brainstem, he beshat himself explosively in Roth’s bathroom up in Connecticut, and the dutiful son cleaned up the mess, using a toothbrush to get in between the floorplanks of the old farmhouse. Then he helped Herman bathe himself – at which point, and perhaps for the first time, he saw his father’s penis: “‘I must remember accurately,’ I told myself, ‘remember everything accurately so that when he is gone I can re-create the father who created me.’ You must not forget anything.” But if the writer in the son never slept, it was the father who, in at least one crucial way, had helped to form that writer:

 

Yes, he was always teaching me something…something coarser than could be accommodated by my…yearnings for a judicious, dignified father to replace the undereducated father who I found myself half-ashamed of…. 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.

 

Roth’s other great teacher, to judge from his own account, was Maggie, whose first meeting with the parents, in New Jersey in the summer of 1957, proved less than auspicious. Bailey quotes here from Roth’s other memoir, The Facts: “What they saw to frighten them wasn’t the shiksa but a hard-up loser four years my senior, a penniless secretary and divorced mother of two small children who, as she was quick to explain at dinner that first night, had ‘been stolen’ from her by her ex-husband.” The following morning, after putting Maggie’s soiled underwear into the wash (at Maggie’s request), Bess walked three miles to her husband’s office, “weeping in despair over what I, with all my prospects, was doing with this obviously foundering woman…. She had seen instantly what was wrong….” That evening, Herman told Maggie it would be best if Philip drove her to the airport the next morning. (At the time, the couple was living in Chicago, where Roth was teaching at the University.) 

The account of all this is rather off-putting, both in Roth’s version, where it contrasts sharply with his idealization of his devoted parents, and in the use Bailey puts it to in his (mostly) less-than-sympathetic portrayal of Maggie. Marsh comments: “Bailey writes of her life with little awareness of the difficulties of survival as a single mother in the 1950s.” And Alexandra Schwartz, reviewing the biography for The New Yorker, sees in Bailey’s description of Maggie as a “bitter, impoverished, sexually undesirable divorcée” an example of someone “who is so relentlessly impaled on Bailey’s prose that his depiction borders on an act of personal vengeance.” 

The matter of revenge deserves some attention here. Given Roth’s stated “terror” of biography (albeit somewhat facetiously expressed), some critics – including the unauthorized biographer, Nadel – think the main reason Roth was interested in having his life story told (and even directed the telling by the preparation of “thousands of pages” (Bailey) of autobiographical manuscript for the express use of his authorized biographer) was to contradict, and counteract, the damaging account of him given by his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, in her memoir Leaving a Doll’s House (1996). Novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick, in the course of a rave review of Bailey’s book for The New York Times (a “narrative masterwork”), mentions that “Bloom’s version of Roth” presents him “as an unfeeling misogynist” (a reading I happen to disagree with), and that this label “persists until this day” (true enough). A more nuanced reading of Roth’s attitude to and portrayal of women is given in Judith Shulevitz’s helpful and perceptive piece in the Jewish Review of Books:

 

Roth’s women were ports of call in his voyage of self-escape…. I suspect that the source of Roth’s problem with women was that they were only intermittently real to him. Usually, they stood for something, which is not the same as being somebody in particular.

 

A useful distinction – but an overall judgment from which Roth himself strongly dissented, as reported by Taylor:

 

“…I aim only at specifics. Entirely for others to say whether some universal has been hit. I have for instance never – I repeat, never – written a word about women in general. This will come as news to my harshest critics but it’s true. Women, each one particular, appear in my books. But womankind is nowhere to be found.”

 

There is no question, though, that the particular women in Roth’s fiction do not appear in the same depth of characterization as the male protagonists. And the valid point that all writers, even the greatest (and Roth is among these; I believe him to be, arguably, the foremost American novelist of the twentieth century), have inevitable blind spots in their vision, does not overwrite that flaw in Roth. He did not quite see women whole. Roth I think alluded to the fact of his imaginative limitations (though without ever acknowledging its application to his female characters) in his own pithy career summary, quoting the heavyweight hero of his youth, Joe Louis: “I did the best I could with what I had.”

In Roth’s portrayal of Maggie (whom he calls “Josie”) in The Facts, while he does not hesitate to excoriate her (“my worst enemy ever”), he shows no inclination either to absolve himself of responsibility for the debacle with his parents: “I could have spared Josie her humiliation, I could have spared my mother her unhappiness…if only I hadn’t been so frightened of appearing heartless in the face of her unrelenting need and everything that was owed to her” — and admits “my enslavement to her sense of victimhood.” 

Roth’s deepest and most lasting resentment against Maggie, however, derived from a deception he described as “her life’s single great imaginative feat”, and which Bailey dubs “the urine fraud.” In January of 1959 the couple were living in New York, in the East Village, when Maggie announced she was pregnant again. (Her first pregnancy, the year before in Chicago, had ended in an abortion.) Roth insisted she get a pregnancy test, and rinsed out a herring jar for her to take to the pharmacy around the corner. But instead, Maggie went to Thompkins Square Park and found a pregnant woman, whom she paid to pee into the jar. The results, of course, came back positive, and the upshot – as had been Maggie’s plan all along – was that Roth agreed to marry her if she got another abortion. But on the day of the bogus procedure – to which, of course, she refused to have Roth accompany her – Maggie went instead to the movies, where she watched several showings of I Want to Live! starring Susan Hayward (for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress. Full disclosure here: my father, Nelson Gidding, co-wrote the screenplay, for which he was nominated for an Oscar.) The following month, Roth and Maggie were married. Bailey quotes an entry in Maggie’s journal for 1959:

 

I really feel like one born without one of the senses but it’s really that I have no conscience. I have the mind to reason what is right and wrong but I have no moral repugnance to keep me from anything but I have [a] huge amount of self-pity where my wickedness [a favorite word of hers, according to Roth] keeps me from having the good things that life gives to good girls.

 

Three years later, Maggie would confess to the deception; though by that time, the marriage was unsalvageable. They were legally separated in 1964, though Maggie, continuing to hold out for a better alimony settlement, never did consent to a divorce. Roth states in The Facts, “Without doubt she was my worst enemy ever, but, alas, she was also nothing less than the greatest creative-writing teacher of them all, specialist par excellence in the aesthetics of extremist fiction.” Roth’s alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman goes his creator one better in his lengthy (and definitive) commentary addressed to the author at the end of the book:

 

Everything you are today you owe to an alcoholic shiksa…. [Maggie] is the real antagonist, the true counterself…the psychopath through whose agency you achieved the freedom from being a pleasing, analytic, lovingly manipulative good boy who never would have been much of a writer.

 

Maggie died early on the morning of May 10, 1968, when the car she was riding in – driven by her former boss and drinking buddy Carter Hunter – crashed into a tree by a transverse in Central Park. Roth refused to identify the body at the morgue, and later that morning, riding in a taxi to make the funeral arrangements, found that he’d been whistling all the way uptown. (His family was big on whistling.) As Roth was getting out of the cab, the driver remarked, “Got the good news early, huh?” Viewing Maggie’s casket later at the funeral home, he said to the body, “You’re dead and I didn’t have to do it.” The morning after the funeral, he visited the scene of the crash in Central Park, and gives this account in The Facts:

 

It was a splendid spring morning and I sat on the grass nearby for about an hour, my head raised to take the sun full in my face. Like it or not, that’s what I did: gloried in the sunshine on my living flesh. “She died and you didn’t,” and that to me summed it up. I’d always understood that one of us would have to die for the damn thing ever to be over…. I felt absolutely nothing about her dying at 39 other than immeasurable relief.

 

But despite his apparently limitless capacity, even in Bailey’s sympathetic treatment, to feel – and act out – unapologetic resentment, aggrievement and vindictiveness toward anyone he thought had done him wrong (and the list by the end was very long), Roth was hardly an unfeeling brute, and one cannot help wondering just what exactly is going on in this passage. Radical honesty? Resolute unsentimentality? A reckoning with himself in his least attractive qualities and feelings? Or maybe this confession was his way of “letting the repellant in” (his own terminology) – a process that was crucial to the creation of Portnoy’s Complaint, on which he was working when Maggie died. Exactly a week after her death, Roth travelled up to the Yaddo Artists’ Colony in upstate New York, where he completed the novel in twelve days. As he remembers in The Facts, “I found that my imagination was fully fired: I worked steadily in a secluded hillside cabin for twelve and fourteen hours a day until the book was done, and then I took the bus back down, feeling triumphant and indestructible.” He had created an American myth, and in doing so had entered into it himself – for better and (mostly) for worse.

At the time of Maggie’s death, four of the stories that would form part of Portnoy’s Complaint had already been published in Esquire, Partisan Review and New American Review (the latter edited by Ted Solotaroff, his friend from University of Chicago days). Those stories, in turn, had come out of comic routines enacted at dinner parties given by his friends Bob and Norma Brustein in New York. (Bob was a professor at Columbia.) Pierpont observes: 

 

Not since Henry Miller adapted his joyously filthy letters home from Paris in order to blast his way out of literary rectitude and into Tropic of Cancer had a writer plumbed such an essentially low-down mode – stand-up comedy with an improvisatory streak – to reinvigorate literature itself…. [Roth] dived into the swamps of the Jewish joke and splashed around. 

 

“I was overthrowing my literary education,” he told Pierpont. “I was overthrowing my first three books [Goodbye, Columbus, Letting Go and When She Was Good].” Bailey quotes Roth’s remark to Bellow: “I kept being virtuous, and virtuous in ways that were destroying me. And when I let the repellant in, I found that I was alive on my own terms.” 

But despite the distinctly unliterary sources of Portnoy, Taylor also recalls, in his memoir, a passage from Conrad’s Lord Jim that Roth told him “has been my credo, the life-blood of my books”. Roth read the passage out loud while Taylor was floating in Roth’s pool in Connecticut (and thus, in Roth’s words, “ideally situated to hear it”):

 

“A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns. The way is to the destructive element submit yourself…. In the destructive element immerse.”

 

Roth then commented to Taylor, “It’s what I’ve said to myself in art and, woe is me, in life too. Submit to the deeps. Let them buoy you up.”

His “submission to the deeps”, and to “the repellant,” was to reap great rewards, both literary and financial. Published in February of 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint was Random House’s best-selling novel to date. It remained a #1 bestseller for 17 weeks, and sold almost 420,000 hardcover copies. The paperback edition sold three and a half million copies in its first five years. Roth received an advance of $250,000, the same amount for the movie rights, $175,000 for paperback rights, and $60,000 when the book was selected as a featured title for The Literary Guild. (And these figures did not include royalty payments for profits earned above the advance.) All in all, this amounts to over $6 million today. But the furor of celebrity sent him right back to Yaddo, where he wrote his psychiatrist, Dr. Hans Kleinschmidt (the original of Portnoy’s Dr. Spielvogel):

 

…I’m afraid. Afraid of my new Position. I have not in years…flushed and perspired as much as I do now, when the focus of conversation turns upon me, even here at the quiet dinner table…. I know what I want: a woman I can trust and love…a home of my own to live a long life in; and to write the best books I can…. I suppose I ache only with vanity – and yet I would relinquish all that, vanity, and pathetic social aspirations, and that ghastly stinking bastard, that son of a bitch, Shame – gladly relinquish that – but how?

 

(One can’t help wondering here whether “Shame” [sic] was not perhaps a Freudian slip for “fame”.) “I discovered I was not a gloomy but a raucous talent,” he told Taylor many years later. “And that’s the story of Portnoy’s Complaint, in which I gleefully overthrew my literary education, shed the proprieties to reveal a Jew in all his libidinous tumult – and good taste be damned.”

But the sudden spotlight also revealed a more chagrined side of his character perhaps not so evident to the general public, who seemed determined only to see him as the incarnation of Alex Portnoy. Roth remarked many years later to Taylor:

 

The book had too much impact. I was not Norman Mailer. Trouble was not my middle name. The book made me too famous, determined too much of my life to come. People don’t believe me when I say this, but I wish I’d just let the individual chapters stand in those magazines. I could have escaped the burden of being a scandal.

 

The wild success of the novel, which seemed to him “a bolt from the blue”, soon drove him into more permanent exile, first to Woodstock, NY, and then to Warren, CT, where in 1972, for $110,000 in cash, he bought an eighteenth-century gray clapboard farmhouse on 40 acres of land (later expanded by 250 acres when he bought an adjoining parcel to keep it from developers), with a separate cottage that became his writing studio. “The best thing I ever did in my life,” he told Bailey. “I’m a great sucker for domesticity. I don’t want to sit in fucking Elaine’s. I want to have dinner, have a drink…read, get in bed, fuck, and go to sleep. What else is there?” The house in Connecticut was to be an on-and-off home for him and Claire Bloom, his second wife, for the 17 years they were together.

They had met twice before, in 1967 and 1974, at the homes of mutual friends, but apparently the third time was the charm. In the fall of 1975 they bumped into each other on Madison Ave. Roth was on the way to see Kleinschmidt, and Bloom was about to leave for Hawaii to shoot a film adaptation of Hemingway’s posthumous novel, Islands in the Stream, co-starring George C. Scott. “I’m sure he’s a monster,” Bloom said, to which Roth replied, “Not all men are monsters.” “And at that point,” Bailey reports her telling an interviewer, “I just fell madly in love with him and his little round professor’s glasses.” The conflation here is significant, I think. It’s as though, in Bloom’s mind, the man himself was equivalent to his intellectual appearance; Bloom, ex-wife of actor Rod Steiger, ex-lover of Richard Burton and Yul Brynner, had finally gotten herself a professor. (Roth had last taught at the University of Pennsylvania – and before that, Chicago, Iowa and Princeton — and would later teach at Hunter and Bard College.) The emphasis on appearance seems to have been evident to others as well. Bailey notes that “the more insightful of their friends detected a quality of playacting to the whole relationship. ‘Everything was perfect,’ Jonathan Brent remarked, ‘but could shatter if someone made a false move.'” 

In her memoir, Bloom includes another telling detail:

 

A week after [they made love for the first time, in February of 1976], we admitted we were in love with each other. Philip spoke first, and his voice was suffused with pain and a kind of suffering; it was as though it hurt him to declare his love for me.

 

That spring, Bloom made her first visit to the house in Connecticut. When she returned to London, she left a dress behind in Roth’s closet, “and a motif of his letters that summer,” Bailey informs us, “concerned his tendency to ravish the garment in her absence.”

In her presence, however, his behavior was rather more restrained, as Bloom observes:

 

There was a deep ambivalence in Philip toward full commitment; he had a long-established fear of giving away too much to a woman;…he felt that he could lose a vital component of himself. From the beginning, the scrutiny I was under was considerable, making me feel as though there was a trial underway and I was the defendant…. Philip always gained the upper hand in any argument, and with his razor-sharp wit could easily say something amusing and cutting to make my position appear futile and humiliating.

 

As the relationship between these two highly talented and neurotic people developed, a number of basic problems transpired. In some ways Roth seems to have been fundamentally unsympathetic to Bloom – and especially to her very close connection with her daughter Anna, who was 16 when the couple first got together — and she to him, at least as far as his numerous physical ailments were concerned (back, neck, heart) — to say nothing of the two nervous collapses he suffered in 1987 and 1993. (More on those in a moment.) There were also logistical problems: he didn’t want to live in London, and she didn’t want to live in Connecticut. (They had agreed to spend half the year in each place; the arrangement worked for a while — 1977-1987 — until it didn’t: from 1987 onwards.)

But the biggest problem between them was Anna – Roth’s relationship with her, and hers with her mother. At first, Anna and Roth seemed to get along fine. “When he was told that Anna was insecure about her writing,” Bailey writes, 

 

Roth sent her a letter “teeming with typographical errors and ungrammatical English,” as Bloom remembered, and even Anna admitted that the two had had a similar sense of humor and “saw eye to eye” on “many subjects”; she also conceded that he was “very interested” in her singing and perceptive in his feedback.

 

But Roth soon came to resent the intense discussions between mother and daughter at the dinner table — perhaps because they didn’t include him. Bloom felt she “was up against two strong personalities, and neither side would give in to the other. It was like having two children who were terrified of losing their mother’s love. And I became a third child, terrified of losing the love of either of them.” Bailey records Roth’s recollection of a fight between mother and daughter: “…first, they were merely screaming at each other, then punches were being thrown and blows being struck – and then Anna screamed at her mother, ‘kike bitch!'”. (In an email to Bailey, Bloom denied this account, calling it an “invention”.)

Though it had begun amicably enough, the relationship between Roth and Anna soon deteriorated. He disliked having her stay with them in the flat in London, where Anna was studying singing at the Guildhall Music School. Roth told friends, “Maggie sent Anna to me,” and in a letter he handed to Bloom in 1978 (when Anna was 18), he proposed two alternatives: either Bloom would come to live with him year-round in Connecticut, and he would pay for her to visit Anna and Bloom’s mother in London every month; or Anna would go to live in the hostel of the Guildhall School. Neither plan was realized, but by 1993 – a watershed year for Roth that included, as we shall see, a nervous breakdown, a creative breakthrough, and the final separation and then divorce from Bloom – the presence of Anna in his life had become unbearable, and he handed Bloom another letter: 

 

I refuse to have my life corroded with resentments spawned by my sense of being encroached on by…a relationship that is not of my making…a relationship to which I am superfluous anyway and always have been because, in my judgment, it does not really admit of another human presence….

 

The letter included the demand that Anna visit Connecticut only once a year, and that when she came to New York, she not stay in their apartment.

Bothersome as they were, though, the problems between Roth and Anna – recreated in fictional form in I Married a Communist – were not the only trouble in the Roth-Bloom relationship (they didn’t actually get married until 1990, and divorced three years later). Always jealous of Bloom’s other attachments — not only to her daughter, but also to her mother — Roth objected strongly to Claire’s behavior when Alice Bloom died in 1983. Bloom sat beside the body for three days, morning to night, and at one point, according to his own written account, Roth stood by as she chatted with the corpse and “stroked her mother’s hair, kissed her face, fondled her hands….” Bailey says that at one point, when the undertaker arrived to remove the body, Bloom “struck him while he stood in the doorway, causing the startled man to depart.” In notes made at the time, Roth recorded: “How far is this going to go?… I think, ‘I’ll never be able to make love to this woman again.’ She is killing sex forever, playing with this dead body.” When Bloom returned home from sitting with the body all day and immediately began preparing dinner, Roth told her: 

 

Claire, you must wash. You are grossly offending my sensibilities. I cannot take anymore of this…. This has become entirely morose and macabre. Your mother is a dead person. She is not a doll to play with. You must stop! 

 

Strange as Bloom’s behavior may seem, Roth’s candid reaction also strikes a reader (this one, anyway) as rather insensitive, self-centered, and tone-deaf under the circumstances. And his habitual clear-sightedness could also be quite cruel. Around the time The Counterlife was published (1986), Bloom remarked, regarding the Maria Freshfield character in that novel, “You love Maria more than you love me,” to which Roth replied, “Of course I love Maria, she doesn’t exist – if you didn’t exist I’d love you too.” While there is considerable imaginative truth in this witticism, it also a good example of just how cutting Roth’s wit could be. There is no indication in either of the recent biographies – or in anything else I have read about Roth – that he was ever physically abusive, but Bloom draws an occasionally frightening portrait in the memoir:

 

He also understood the part of me that was afraid of him. I had once seen a facet of his character that shocked me deeply. Angry over something…, he turned toward me with the face of an uncontrollable and malevolent child in a temper tantrum; his lower jaw thrust forward, his mouth contorted, his dark eyes narrowed. This expression of out-and-out hatred went far beyond anything I could possibly have done to provoke it. I remember thinking, with total clarity, ‘Who is that?’

 

The lack of sympathy, though, was not only on Roth’s end. In the summer of 1987, following unsuccessful knee surgery, Roth had a disastrous (though not uncommon) reaction to the sleep medication Halcion, which produced panic and hallucinations. As Bloom recalls:

 

…he began a harrowing, regressive slide back into his early childhood. Philip’s mother had died in 1981, and now, suddenly, he became her little boy again. He clung to me in a way he never had before, his entire body trembling with the desperate need for maternal comfort and reassurance…. Philip disintegrated before my eyes into a disoriented, terrified infant.

 

Bloom’s suggestion to alleviate her partner’s suffering? “Why don’t we walk in the fields? Why don’t we go for a swim?” Roth’s friend Joel Conarroe, who was visiting at the time, “was struck,” Bailey tells us, “by Bloom’s self-involvement (‘It was all about her’) in the face of Roth’s desperation”. She did, however, see her way clear to credit Roth’s old friend Bernie Avishai, also on hand during the crisis, with saving his life. Avishai recognized Roth’s symptoms as side-effects of Halcion dependence, and with the help of a psychopharmacologist he knew at MIT, and small doses of Valium, Avishai got Roth off the Halcion, spending three nights at his side as he went cold-turkey.

Two years later, in 1989, Roth suffered another health crisis when he experienced chest pains and extreme fatigue while swimming, and had to have emergency quintuple bypass surgery. The surgery not only resulted in an immediate revitalization of his physical powers, but was also, according to Taylor, “the proximate cause of a creative rebirth, probably the greatest in American literary history. What followed was a sequence of masterpieces,” the first of which was Operation Shylock, published in 1993, whose opening pages give a basically unaltered account of the “Halcion madness” of 1987. There ensued, in relatively short order, the breakthrough works of Sabbath’s Theater (1995) – Roth’s personal favorite among his novels, which won the National Book Award (his second, after Goodbye, Columbus in 1960) – and then the “American Trilogy” (1997-2000): American Pastoral (which won the Pulitzer Prize), I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain.

It was no doubt the revival of his physical and creative energies in 1989 that led to his decision to finally marry Claire in April of the following year. She had first proposed to him (in a letter! Definitely an epistolary relationship!) on New Year’s Day – but it took him three weeks to reply (which he also did by letter: “Dearest Actress, I love you. Will you marry me? An Admirer”). (Again, one notes the “quality of playacting” remarked earlier by his friends.) “But something ominous had taken place during the interval,” Bloom writes in her memoir, “which I had chosen to disregard. Had I done otherwise, it would have given me the clearest message that the marriage was no more than Philip playing lip-service to my desire to be married.” What Bloom is referring to was a stringent prenuptial agreement, drawn up over the interval, and

 

glaring in its absence of any provision for me should Philip decide, for any reason whatsoever, to seek a divorce…. Under its conditions, he could terminate our marriage at will, with no further responsibility toward his wife; the apartment [in New York], possessions, everything reverted back to him. 

 

One does wonder why, considering their rocky history together, either one wanted to get married in the first place. Bailey’s supposition, while cynical, does not seem unwarranted:

 

Perhaps the crucial factor in Roth’s decision was the hope that Anna would be “out of my hair” for good; if he married Bloom, his thinking went, she’d feel more secure about staying in the States while her adult daughter pursued a singing career abroad.

 

As for Bloom’s motivations, they are even less clear; though she does mention, elsewhere in her memoir, her fear of abandonment, and her inability to oppose Roth (even though the original proposal had come from her).

1993 saw the publication of Operation Shylock and, with the commencement of work on Sabbath’s Theater, the continuation of Roth’s extraordinary creative rebirth that had begun in the wake of his bypass surgery back in 1989. The summer of ’93, however, also marked the onset of the worst emotional crisis of his life, which would precipitate his separation and divorce from Bloom later that year. In July, suffering from extreme depression, Roth committed himself to Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, CT. In early August, he met with Bloom in his psychiatrist’s office to recount everything she’d done in the 17 years they’d been together that had angered him. Bloom became hysterical, repeating to herself, “My marriage is over.” Two days after the meeting, his psychiatrist told Roth: “Philip, nothing you hold against your wife has been more than petty annoyance.” Roth was discharged from Silver Hill in mid-August, but his behavior continued to be erratic, and by early September, he’d checked himself back in. Later that month, he confronted Bloom when she came to visit and accused her of trying to poison him. Again she became hysterical, and this time was sedated and kept overnight at the hospital. Roth was released at the end of the month, but his moods continued to roller-coaster, and their marriage had reached a stalemate. “The more I told him that I loved him,” Bloom recounts, “the more cold and rejecting he became. The more cold and rejecting he became, the more I felt motivated to tell him that I loved him.” Late in October, she was served with separation papers, followed by divorce papers a week later. The following May, Roth composed a bitter directive: “It is my strong wish that Claire Bloom be barred from my funeral and from any memorial service arranged for me. All possible measures should be taken to enforce this.” (In the event, the directive was respected, and on Memorial Day, 2018, Bloom was not among the roughly 80 mourners gathered at the funeral, held at Bard College, where Roth had taught, and where his plain granite headstone – name and dates only – was placed a year later.)

In the fall of 1993, however, after his release from the hospital – as well as from the unhappy marriage to which he had contributed more than his fair share of pain — Roth’s vital artistic powers had never been stronger. This was part of a discernible pattern in which the traumatic endings of both marriages (the first by sudden death, the second by divorce) were immediately followed by a liberating influx of extraordinary creative energy. In 1968, this energy was channeled into the completion of Portnoy, which marked a seismic shift in the course his career (as well as, arguably, the course of American literary history and popular culture); in 1993, the liberated energy was directed at a prompt resumption of work on Sabbath’s Theater, his personal favorite of all his novels. Bailey nicely evokes the scene of Roth’s rebirth that October:

 

Opening the door to his empty apartment on West 77th, Roth was struck by the sight of sunlight gleaming on his highly polished parquet floor – so like the parlor floor of his childhood apartment…. ‘You’re gonna be all right,’ he thought. An hour or so later, he was back in his studio, working on Sabbath’s Theater.

 

As Pierpont informs us, “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.'” (Well, for him, at any rate.) Critic Michael Gorra, writing in The New York Review of Books, observes, “…he had the necessary ‘splinter of ice in the heart,’ as Graham Greene once put it, that allowed him to turn the people he loved into material.” (Preeminently, himself.) 

The nearly ecstatic creative freedom that Roth periodically experienced in the wake of his exit from encumbering relationships (which, one is apt to conclude from accounts of his life, meant any sexual relationship lasting more than, say, a couple of years) entailed also a return to the alter-egos – Portnoy, Sabbath, and, in the remarkable “American Trilogy” that followed Sabbath, Nathan Zuckerman once again (who’d first appeared in The Ghost Writer [1979]) – that were an imaginative necessity for him. “Roth often spoke of his ‘freedom’ while writing Sabbath,” says Bailey, “a sense he could do no wrong, slipping in and out of Sabbath’s thoughts, the first and third person, dancing along a high wire between pathos and hilarity.” Pierpont, drawing on a term coined by the Romantic German poet Heinrich Heine, identifies this as “Maskenfreiheit” — “the freedom conferred by masks” – and cites the commentary by Zuckerman at the end of The Facts as a salient example of such revealing concealment: 

 

The plainest fact of The Facts is that Roth without Zuckerman is [in Zuckerman’s words] “what you get in practically any artist without his imagination.” The implicit lesson of The Facts is that the only way to reach the truth is through fiction. 

 

“As Roth would have it,” Bailey points out, “truth is what our imaginations make and remake of it,” then cites the master himself: “We are all writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time, contradictory but mutually entangling stories that, however subtly or grossly falsified, constitute our hold on reality and are the closes thing we have to the truth.” And Zuckerman, responding to his creator in The Facts, turns the screw even further: “…the most cunning form of disguise is to wear a mask that bears the image of one’s own face.” (One thinks here of the “Philip Roth” character in Operation Shylock – not just the character Moishe Pipik pretending to be Philip Roth, but yet another character, not quite congruent with the author himself, referred to as “Philip Roth”.) The surest way to err in the understanding of people and character is to think you have access to the truth. (And now one thinks of Freud’s severe dictum: “The truth is not accessible; mankind does not deserve it.”) Here is Zuckerman again, this time in American Pastoral:

 

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong….

 

But on this count, Roth was guilty of applying a double standard, as Taylor astutely points out:

 

Yet he was not similarly skeptical about his own self-understanding in real life – “the unwritten world”, as he preferred to call it. Bluntly, Philip was allergic to the idea that he could have been at fault in either of his unhappy marriages and to the idea that the [other party] might, in both cases, have had grievances worth considering. His own angle of vision was complete and unfailing. Other accounts were distortions.

 

Which is perhaps only another way of saying that if you want the truth about Roth’s life, look to his fiction. (Something Bailey doesn’t do nearly enough; more on that below.) In this regard, Roth can be considered, according to critic James Wood in The New Yorker, “the great stealth postmodernist of American letters, able to have his cake and eat it without any evidence of crumbs.” Wood goes on:

 

This is because he does not regard himself as a postmodernist. He is intensely interested in fabrication, in the performance of the self, in the reality that we make up in order to live; but his fiction examines this “without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal fakery or magic-realist gimmickry,” as Zuckerman says [in The Ghost Writer].

 

On the relationship between the life and the fiction, Bailey reports that “there was usually about a 10-year gap between his life and his writing (versus, he said, less than 24 hours for Updike).” Roth saw Updike as his chief living competitor. Pierpont compares their creative relation to that of two of the greatest 20th-century painters: “…Roth would have to be Picasso – the energy, the slashing power – and Updike would be Matisse: the color, the sensuality…. But they are united in having spent a lifetime possessed by America.” She also cites a somewhat backhanded compliment Roth paid to Updike:

 

…Roth is a tremendous admirer of…the “gush of prose” that he believes Updike (like Bellow) had at his command. “I don’t have the gush of prose,” Roth tells me. “I have the gush of invention, dialogue, event…but not of prose….” It’s a distinction he seems to have thought about carefully. “Many days I was delighted to accept one page after six hours of work. On days when I’d have four or five pages they would not be fluent, and I’d have to spend four or five days working on them…. I have to fight for my fluency, every paragraph, every sentence.”

 

One detects here a slightly invidious distinction, however genially couched, between style and substance; though the admiration for his rival was sincere, and consistent over the years — such that at Updike’s death, Roth wrote to author Ted Hoagland: “He was the indestructible writer with the indestructible fluency. He was an ace, maybe the ace. ‘The’ suits him fine, in nearly every regard.”

For Bellow, on the other hand, the admiration was always unqualified. Roth told Pierpont 

 

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.” 

 

Bellow, however, could be ambivalent regarding Roth’ work. “What has Roth got?” he quipped to Dick Cavett in 1981, and remonstrated with Roth in a letter about the Zuckerman trilogy: “Why write three novels that examine one’s career as a novelist? Things are bad out there. The knife is at our throats. One can’t write books so attentive to one’s own trouble.” Though Bellow did praise Goodbye, Columbus when it came out, and had a special regard, much later, for The Plot Against America. In the last year of his life, Bailey reports, “the only novel Bellow wanted to read was The Plot Against America – ‘Where’s the book?’ he’d call to Janis [his fifth and last wife], who knew which one he meant – opening at any page and reading as if for the first time.” Bellow was also sympathetic to Roth’s feelings about not getting the Nobel, and gave him the top hat he’d worn to the ceremony in Stockholm.

Regarding his literary relationship to both writers, Roth put it very nicely, with characteristic simplicity and clear-sightedness, in a statement he made in 1982: “Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the real world as it is now. I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.”

Of writers other than Bellow and Updike, however, he could be a brutally honest critic. After eviscerating the manuscript of Bernard Malamud’s last book when the novelist was old and in fact dying, he asked Pierpont if he’d been too hard. 

 

I said, “Yes”…. He argued that he could never be anything less than honest where writing was concerned; he was sorry he had hurt Bernie, but he was compelled to tell the absolute truth when asked to do so by a fellow writer.

 

He was always an attentive listener – “probably the best listener in my life,” said his friend (and, briefly, lover) Mia Farrow. (Incidentally, he detested Woody Allen, of whom he remarked: “He seized upon the persona of the schlemiel as, in all senses, a profitable disguise. But inside this schlemiel there lives a crocodile.”) “The book of my life is a book of voices,” says his persona Zuckerman in I Married a Communist. “When I ask myself how I arrived at where I am, the answer surprises me: Listening.” As a listener, though, Roth had an agenda.  Novelist Janet Hobhouse, with whom he had a six-month affair, and who later became a good friend (Sabbath’s Theater was dedicated to her), noted in her novel The Furies of the character “Jack,” based closely on Roth, that “…he always listened like someone decoding, sensing, processing vulnerability, a place to enter, overpower….” And Remnick, writing in the magazine he edits (The New Yorker), had this to say: 

 

To be in his presence was an exhilarating, though hardly relaxing, experience. He was unnervingly present, a condor on a branch, unblinking, alive to everything: the best detail in your story, the slackest points in your argument.

 

Though Roth does not seem to have been curious about people in and of themselves – only insofar as they could be stored away and later used in his fiction. Biblical scholar Jack Miles, who was one of the readers Roth relied on to critique his draft manuscripts, compares him with their mutual friend, the novelist Richard Stern: “I realized that Dick had a kind of curiosity about people that Philip didn’t have,” and Bailey goes on: “…indeed, [Miles] came to regard Roth the way Dr. Watson regards Sherlock Holmes – as blithely indifferent to and even rather ignorant about much of the world and its people, but keenly focused on what he wants to know.” This quality of self-serving interest is perhaps best exemplified in an anecdote his best friend Taylor relates. One Sunday, Taylor had been to an awe-inspiring program on cosmology at the Hayden Planetarium, practically across the street from Roth’s apartment on West 77th St. Afterwards, he met Roth for Chinese food, as they often did on Sundays. Taylor was still full of the wonders he’d just seen at the Planetarium, and wanted to talk about them. But Roth rebuffed him: “‘Eat up, Ben…. You’re talking a lot tonight. Eat your supper.’ What he was not interested in, he was not interested in.”

The same might be said of Bailey as Roth’s biographer. For readers who want to know who Roth was sleeping with when, or who he hated, and why, Bailey’s biography fits the bill. He’s certainly done the research, and as the authorized biographer he had access to a mass of personal papers off-limits to Roth’s more academic biographer, Ira Nadel. But in this connection, I am reminded of a review of Peter Gay’s 1988 biography of Freud, written by my professor in graduate school, the Victorianist James Kincaid, who was a great admirer of Foucault. Noting the lack of critical foundation and scaffolding in Gay’s biography, and speculating about the kind of book that might have resulted had Gay been more informed by cultural theory (of the kind of which Foucault was the master), Kincaid tartly concluded: “It’s too bad the two of them couldn’t have gotten together. One has all the note cards; the other has all the ideas.” Bailey indeed has all the note cards. But what is missing from his book is any literary appreciation or contextualization of the work itself — the work for which there arose a need for all those note cards in the first place. Bailey is a lively and entertaining writer, and he certainly knows how to tell the story as he sees it.  The problem is that he sees it – for all the color and drama of the life – rather superficially, without taking into account the thing that, by Roth’s own testimony (or was it that of Zuckerman? And what exactly is the difference again?), was that life’s most important element: imagination. The imaginative life of the writer, and of the work, is almost entirely missing from Bailey’s account. As Shulevitz rightly observes, “Roth’s chief doppelgänger, Nathan Zuckerman, understands Roth much better than Bailey does.” Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the fictional creation of a writer of genius with his merely mortal biographer, but the problem remains: what can any literary biography have to offer in terms of literary insight when its subject – or rather, a fictional character created by its subject – has already, it would seem, given the most perceptive account of the matter?  Here Gorra identifies the chief limitation of Bailey: “He’s not really a critic, and he isn’t that interested in the inner life of the fiction itself…. So the sense of character Bailey offers is above all a social one.” The social character of the man – the people he knew, the friends and enemies he made, the women he slept with and married, his professional dealings (publishers, editors and agents) – is certainly an important part of the picture, a full and interesting one, but the deeper springs supplying his creative mind and artistic achievement remain untapped by Bailey’s approach. “Why Roth matters” is not a question that Bailey appears to have ever stopped writing to consider. Maybe he was just too busy with all the note cards to ask.

Or maybe it’s more a problem of historical situation. Roth has only been dead three years. We can’t possibly yet have the historical perspective necessary to properly evaluate his literary and cultural significance – the perspective, say, that gave Leslie Marchand’s definitive 1957 biography of Byron its scope and resonance. I’m not saying we need a three-volume biography of Roth; though the raw material is probably there. What I’m saying is we need more time – probably a lot more time – for all the different parts of this complicated man, and his times, to fall into place. And the comparison to Byron, I think, is not an idle one. At the end of July 1968, when the completed manuscript of Portnoy had been delivered, Jason Epstein, Roth’s editor at Random House, predicted that the book would have an enormous impact: “You will have an effect on the current generation like Byron’s on his so that every man of fashion will have to model himself hereafter on A.P.”. The analogy, while tongue-in-cheek, was not entirely whimsical. One thinks of the prepossessing charm and wit of both figures, as recorded by those who knew them (and Roth was, or became, as much of a “figure” in and for his time as His Lordship – though granted, Roth was not, and never will be, a world-historical figure, as Byron was). The charisma, the moodiness, the transgressiveness, the expression of the zeitgeist. The myth that grew up around them, that they both promoted and fled (Byron, granted, more than Roth) into self-exile. Their reliance on literary personae with strongly autobiographical elements (one thinks, in Byron’s case, of Childe Harold, Don Juan, and the various protagonists of the “oriental tales”). Their delight in theatrical self-performance. The almost Svengali-like effect of their dark handsomeness and intensity. Their hypersexuality (in Roth’s case, exclusively heterosexual). Their generosity and cruelty, active by turns. (Though the petty vindictiveness is Roth’s own.) Their manic creative energy. (Byron, it now seems, was bipolar; the jury is still out on Roth, though he does seem to have shown a milder form of this ailment.) And there was, in both writers, an almost satanic – or perhaps a better word is Faustian — quality to their genius, gifted and wielded at great personal cost. Byron’s greatest works – the last two cantos of Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain, and Don Juan, in its endless power of comic invention – emerged only after the eviscerating (and self-inflicted) scandal of his separation from his prim wife Annabella Milbanke (the “princess of parallelograms”, as he titled her), and his self-banishment to the Continent. The liberation that Roth required to bring both Portnoy and its later, fuller incarnation, Sabbath’s Theater, to completion, was achieved by the death of his first wife and his dramatic, traumatic separation from his second. One has the sense, in both writers, that their art was inseparable from a certain intercourse (and I use the term advisedly) with the devil — with infernal forces in their makeup that they relied upon to spark their creativity. They were both in touch with uncontrollable, potentially destructive energies that they were able to put to triumphant use. Roth’s severe remark on the imagination, quoted by Bailey, is pertinent here:

 

The butcher, imagination, wastes no time with niceties: it clubs the fact over the head, quickly slits its throat, and then with its bare hands, it pulls forth the guts…. By the time the imagination is finished with a fact, believe me, it bears no resemblance to a fact.

 

Both writers were avid readers of history, though their creative use of it was quite different. Byron used his sense of history, and his knowledge of historical facts, as a kind of veridical base on which to ground his fictions; he felt fiction alone was vaguely disreputable. (“I hate things all fiction,” he said.) Roth believed the opposite: that fiction was truer – more veridical, if you will — than fact, and that the imaginative component of life was primary (if not always acknowledged as such). And both writers employed a variety of strongly autobiographical fictional personae – alter-egos — to embody their autofictions, as the current term of art has it. To read the major works of both writers – Childe Harold, Don Juan, Portnoy, Sabbath, the “American Trilogy” – is to encounter, through some of the highest achievements of literary expression, fundamental questions about the connections between life and the imagination — between autobiography and fiction — that are (or at least should be) at the center of the theory and practice of literary biography. James Parker, reviewing Bailey in The Atlantic, offers some rich insights into the matter:

 

The questions to which [Roth] sought answers, the questions of the mighty novelist – why? why? why? – were primordial and inexhaustible. The agonized alter egos who rotated through his books…were not experimental fiddles or metafictional gimmicks: They were ways of coming at it, ways of getting into it, ways of being real. How to crowbar as much of himself into the novel as possible, and then do it again – that was the experiment…. And now, for us, the life and the work seem to be offering the same challenge: How close are you, reader, to the wellsprings of your life? Because they’re down there, those torrents, still boiling out of the rock that split at your birth. Can you manage them, harness them, make them work for you? Do you have the Philip Rothness, day after day, for that?

 

Food for thought, to be sure; but the dramatic note needs to be tempered, I think, by a couple of softer strains in the man that may come, after the Byronic vein I have been mining, as something of a surprise. We learn from Nadel (I don’t recall seeing it in Bailey, though I might have missed it there) that Roth was once given a gift of kittens, “but had to get rid of them because they were too delightful and interfered with his writing….” This little tidbit is revealing, and hints at the much greater personal sacrifices that must have been entailed in Philip Roth being, and becoming, Philip Roth. What we learn from Bailey is, quite simply, astonishing:

 

Roth liked to pray when he was happy, as he confided to his friend Jack Miles, the former Jesuit seminarian: “I used to do this frequently at Yaddo, during the years when I was recovering from everything [i.e., Portnoy], and I have embraced trees and knelt on the ground in the rural isolation of Connecticut. Keep it under your hat.

 

Well, the cat’s now officially out of the bag (or out from under the hat): Philip Roth was a kitten-lover, and a tree-hugger. Who knew?

 

Josh Gidding is the author of Failure: An Autobiography (2007), and has published a number of personal essays in literary journals. His essay “On Not Being Proust: An Essay in Literary Failure” was listed in Best American Essays 2009.  He has taught at USC, Holy Cross, Dowling College and Stony Brook University, and currently teaches at Highline College near Seattle, WA.