Helen Frankenthaler once mused that “artists were like cockroaches, for them everything was grist for the mill…” Philip Roth’s grist came from his close observation of people in his orbit and the world at large. But mostly it came from his own life which he constantly chewed up and regurgitated as fiction until the line between the two blurred. Roth also thrived on criticisms leveled at him from ranking members of the Jewish intelligentsia such as Gershom Scholem, Irving Howe, and Norman Podhoretz. They denounced him as a self-hating Jew and anti-Semite to boot.
Blake Bailey’s chronicle of Roth’s life traces a trajectory that broke barriers, putting sex and Jewish miscreants front and center in ways that sparked outrage, scorn, and praise in nearly equal measure.
Bailey begins his biography with Roth’s early life and it includes much about Roth’s parents and even his grandparents. Bailey’s particulars reveal how Phillip the kid became Roth the literary titan. It seems to have been inevitable that Roth would wind up marrying two misandrists while only dallying, albeit for years in some relationships, with women who loved the full Phillip–that expansive self nurtured by his parents, especially his mother, Bess. For Roth, his Anima and Animus, had equal billing, though I suspect Roth was a “mama’s boy.” He was cossetted in the same way that Bess cosseted her husband. As a result, Roth was also capable of mothering the women he became involved with. Cooking and caring for them while at the same time, like his father, Herman, expecting that same treatment from the women who passed through his life.
An echt moment in the Roth household came during the shiva period after Bess died. The house was filled with mourners supporting the family. One of Philip’s aunts came up to him and mentioned his father had disappeared. The family found him upstairs in the parental bedroom with the closet doors flung open and a pile of Bess’s clothing on the floor and the bed. According to Roth, “…he was simply doing what he had done all his life: the next difficult job.” This hints at the inherited drive that kept Roth working through thick and thin.
In his eulogy for his mother, Roth wrote:
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; order for sisters with difficult lives, for nieces and nephews with family problems, for grandsons to whom she dispensed not merely grandmothering but mothering as well…She proceeded with the meticulous precision that we more readily associated with the cutting diamonds than with performing the relentless daily chores of ordinary family life. But the daily chores of family life were just that to her–precious jewels to be cut to perfection and given to those she loved.
This is the foundation for all of Roth’s social and professional behavior—his treatment of his friends and lovers, his will to work, and the precision of his prose.
Bailey begins by detailing early vestiges of Roth’s family dating back to the beginning of the 20th C. when Roth’s grandparents arrive as immigrants. Bailey pairs his version of familial history with episodes in Roth’s novels. And so the blurring begins. The reader learns that Roth’s father, affectionately known to his siblings as, “Little Hymie,” was allowed to remain in school while his older siblings abandoned their studies for work-life. If Herman felt somewhat entitled to begin with, Roth’s mother, Bess, seems to have amplified those feelings. It was into this pamper-order that Roth was born. There is little in Bailey’s biography that probes deeply into the inner Roth, though the pages are full of surface clues about Roth’s way of being. Bailey doesn’t reflect deeply on the question of Phil-ness. While I can imagine Roth excoriating authorial peers had they referred to him as Phil, there was a small group of friends for whom the prosaic “Phil” aptly expressed the nature of their relationship with Roth. To them he was just Phil, a guy you hung out with, talked about women with, had a few beers with, went to ball games with…a regular guy. Sex, sports, thinking, writing…these paths to assimilation were Roth’s to explore as a post-immigrant in America who adjusted to a foreign culture as Jews had assimilated into the local cultures of Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere for centuries.
I think that at some point–after Roth became known as a writer–he realized that with notoriety came not just money and acclaim, but sexual license. He went with his adolescent-forever libido. His male acquaintances and friends found his success with women titillating and intimidating. Roth, meanwhile, was having it all. He grasped that in the world he’d entered there would always be two battlefields: the sexual and the intellectual.
Roth led an extremely complicated life. Given the serial sexual relationships, 31 books, intermittent teaching schedule, voluminous correspondence…not to mention his two marriages with their disastrous endings, the scope of his life seems nearly Shakespearean. Reading Bailey, I began to see Roth as a figure who suffered arrested development from the waist down even as he continued to grow from the neck up as a writer and observer of the world, becoming a trickster who blended truth and fiction seamlessly.
It’s easy to presume that Roth was a guiding presence during the writing of this book. Such a role would fit, given his penchant for doubling up in so much of his writing. Plenty of passages might lead readers to conclude Phillip Roth ghostwrote his own biography. Take this figure (cited on page 532): “Three” Phillip specifies, when his mistress asks how many affairs he’s had with students—the same number that Roth gave his biographer. ”What was he like?” asks Phillip (at another moment), pretending to be his own biographer. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bailey’s biography contained more words by Roth than by Bailey. That being said, Bailey’s exposition and his use of the quotations to construct imaginary dialogues and real ones, limns Roth’s life in a way that that reveals much….even as it leaves much out.
For all of Roth’s obsession with masturbation, for example, the reader is not let in on the objects of his fantasies. As for the claim that Roth was a misogynist, Bailey makes clear that Roth was at times angry in the extreme at both women and men, mostly due to duplicitous figures like Maggie, his first wife, and Ross Miller, his would-be biographer. When he suffered abuse at the hands of lovers or critics, he returned the same in spades. The claim that Roth was a misogynist is based largely on Claire Bloom’s tell-all, Leaving a Doll’s House, and Roth’s use of lingo from the 1950’s and 1960’s that reflected dim, reductionist views of women.
Bailey doesn’t try to comprehend Roth’s complex relations with women, though he reports on what happened. Roth’s married life seems to have been doomed since he chose hard, needy women. The first, Maggie, faked a pregnancy and faked an abortion. She wound up suing Roth for vast sums of money, while resisting a divorce. Had she not died in an auto accident, she might have broken Roth. Claire Bloom (ne’ Blume, ne Blumenthal), had been with Roth for 20 years by the time he left her. Bloom took her rage to the page, publishing Leaving The Doll’s House, in which she ostensibly set the record straight her way.
Money features disproportionally in Bailey’s telling. He hammers on the theme repeatedly, noting prices paid for Roth’s work by various magazines, payments for teaching gigs, publishers’ advances etc. The obsessive focus on money, given that Roth is a very Jewish writer, verges on becoming an anti-Semitic trope. To be fair, Bailey also makes clear that Roth was an extremely generous benefactor to an amazing range of people, including his first wife’s children, friends down on their luck, cooks/housekeepers and even Claire Bloom, to whom he gave a total of half-a-million dollars, which included a $100,000 gift and the creation of a trust with $400,000 that provided an annual income to Bloom of nearly $30k. It was moving to learn Roth was one of the creators and the primary benefactor for the “Ad Hoc Fund,” which channeled money to impoverished writers persecuted after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Roth went so far as to impersonate family members of those writers in order to enable them to evade detection by commissars. His Ad Hoc Fund helped writers such as Ivan Klima, Milan Kundera, and Ludvik Vaculik, who challenged Roth one evening, claiming that he could name more American Indian tribes than Roth. Vaculik won 45-39.
Tragedy, but mostly pathos fed Roth’s humor. Certain turns in his own life seem almost fated to enable him to conjure the sublime humor he generated by leaning into the inexorable absurdities of middle class life, and Jewish life in particular. Along with the humor of that life, Roth was always alive to the tragic reality that Jews in the diaspora never quite gain acceptance into the cultures and societies in which they find themselves. A Jew, no matter how secular, is first and foremost a Jew. Roth seemed locked on this truth throughout his life and this adds a kind of intimate, human quality to his stories even when they’re enacted on a grand stage. His appeal to Jews and non-Jews isn’t far removed from the voyeuresque, especially when Roth became involved in very public yet tribal disputes with fellow Jews who attacked him.
In the era of New York Intellectuals, there was a sort of Ocean’s 11 aspect to quarrels among literary men, which came with a lot of gratuitous smart-assing. Among young African Americans, it was once known as the Dozens, and such trash talking was the rule among the too-smart set during Roth’s climb to fame and fortune.
Norman Podhoretz and Irving Howe double-teamed Roth in the December, 1972 issue of Commentary. Podhoretz, Commentary’s editor at the time, led the attack with a piece titled, “Laureate of the New Class.” (He got that right at least since Roth was in the vanguard of a rising cohort.) He accused Roth of implying that “Americans are disgusting people” and claimed Roth left readers imagining America was “inhabited by vulgarians, materialists, boors, and bored.” A few pages on Irving Howe launched a second salvo in a piece where he came hard at Roth for maligning the image of “…Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families” that Howe and his generation had carefully cultivated. Howe imaged Roth as writer with a “thin personal culture” whose work mindlessly confirmed “what had always been suspected about those immigrant Jews but had recently not been tactful to say.”
About ten months after the December Commentary slap-downs, the Egyptians launched their surprise attack on Israel with the declared aim of pushing the Jews into the sea. Howe approached one of Roth’s closest friends, Alan Lelchuk, asking him to find out if Roth would be willing to write in support of Israel on the Times Op Ed page. Lelchuk passed the request along to Roth, giving him the opportunity to reply to Howe’s past put-downs. Roth began by asking Howe why he didn’t speak directly to him, rather than going to a go-between. From there Roth whittled away until there wasn’t much left of the critic’s original argument (or his standing as a sophisticated reader of literary texts).
Roth, like others in the “New Class” of New York Intellectuals, found an audience ready to clock their ups and downs. And Roth, like other N.Y.I.’s, sought to go high/low. Their efforts to engage common readers led these Budweiser intellectuals into American culture…even as they stood removed, notebooks in hand, chronicling the pathos of conflicted Jewish Americans. (Or should that phrase read: American Jews?)
One might think of Bailey’s biography as a variation on Operation Shylock: A Confession. In that novel Roth imagines himself pursuing a man who is using his name to promote “Diasporism”—a philosophy based on the notion that Israelis should return to the nations they had come from. Roth meets up with his impersonator and discovers that his double even looks like him. Roth meets an old friend and convinces him that he and his impersonator are, in fact, the same person. Roth begins impersonating the impersonator because his double has a beautiful girlfriend, Jinx, whom Roth desperately wants to bed.
That Roth and Bailey have earned similarly louche reputations probably made their collaboration that much richer. Bailey’s biography, which is supported with copious notes, a chronology of interviews, index and acknowledgements, deserves better than to be disappeared due to rumor-mongering about its author or subject. The first print run, of 50,000 copies, hasn’t sold out. New, hard-bound copies are still available on Amazon.