|
Philip Roth: A Counterlife
Ira Nadel
Oxford: University Press,
2021 Hardcover. xx + 546 p. ISBN 978-0199846108. £22.99
Reviewed
by
Brett
Ashley Kaplan University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “Fiction as
Revenge” - I - “Roth
was a pugilist, a counterpuncher schooled in the streets of Newark” [115] If you’re looking for a biography that
paints a picture of Philip Roth as generous, kind, happy, thoughtful, empathic…well,
you’ve come to the wrong place. Ira Nadel, Professor of English at the
University of British Columbia, looks at Roth through distinctly un-rose tinted
glasses. Nadel paints a portrait of a Roth who is narcissistic, angry,
vindictive and yes, sometimes, especially when it comes to championing Eastern
European writers, combatting the Vietnam War, writing big checks to family,
friends, and lovers, looking after ill companions, thoughtful and empathic. But
between multiple adulterous affairs, endless lawsuits and arguments with
publishers and potential biographers, and the unending poison of his first [and,
well, second] marriage, Roth comes across in this biography as a difficult,
selfish man indeed. Nadel combed through an enormous
amount of material in this 546-page biography and its particular angle, which
differentiates it from Blake Bailey’s biography, is that Nadel reads Roth as an
analyst would. He makes psychoanalytically inflected comments throughout the
telling of the story of this writer’s long and eventful life. There were many
details about Roth’s life that I had not known, so I learned a great deal
through reading this fat, satisfying book. He paces the story of Roth’s life
with an interesting and effective mix of speed and depth. He’ll linger on the
context in ways that bring the world of Roth’s emergence as a writer to life.
Nadel doesn’t just mention that Roth’s early successes revolved around the
prestigious literary magazine The Paris Review, he digs into the history
of the magazine and the major players that brought it to prominence so that at
every turn we’re learning not just the events that made up a life but something
about the history surrounding that life. Roth was inconsistent about the very
idea of a biography. He claimed, at one point, that he did not believe the
“biography of a writer has anything to do with his books” [425] but he was
spurred to accept the idea of a biography in part to correct what he felt were
slings and arrows from his second wife, the British actress, Claire Bloom,
whose Leaving a Doll’s House [1996] did not paint a pretty picture of
the American writer. After chucking out potential biographer Ross Miller,
editor of the Library of America volumes on Roth, Roth decided on Blake Bailey
and then began dictating how the biography should be. His three hundred page
“Notes for My Biographer” contained the facts as Roth wanted them to be
recorded. “Roth was,” Nadel summarizes, “directing and even writing his
biography” [427]. It will surprise no one to learn that Roth was a bit of a
control freak and that before he retreated to his house in Cornwall Bridge,
Connecticut for the summer he would draw up “diagrams for the exact positioning
of the patio furniture” [429] and convey them to the caretaker. One of the distinctive marks of
Nadel’s biography is that he relies heavily on the fiction almost as if it were
fact. Philip Roth : A Counterlife, delves into Roth’s psychology
through the psychology of his characters as well as through comments and
interviews from people close to [or formerly close to] the writer (Roth torpedoed
many friendships the moment they soured). “Discontent,” Nadel asserts, “defined
Roth from the very beginning of his literary life” [1]. This discontent stemmed
from multiple sources: Roth felt betrayed by many friends and lovers, and, at
points, “writing itself betrayed him” [3]. Roth was attacked by some members of
Jewish communities for his unsavory portraits of Jewish Americans and his first
wife, Maggie Williams, betrayed him in an oft-repeated moment whereby she
tricked him into marrying him by feigning pregnancy through purchasing a
pregnant stranger’s urine. Quite a ploy! Roth, Nadel details, felt betrayed by
Saul Bellow, the giant of Jewish American literature whose writing Roth admired
but also felt in deep competition with, when Bellow insulted him during an
interview. Roth felt betrayed by the endless attacks from feminists, by his
friends selling private documents, and by his life being mined for fiction [3].
This last betrayal is deeply ironic given how many of his friends and critics Roth
imported, often scantily disguised, into his fiction (the fictional Milton
Appel standing in for Irving Howe, Coleman’s Silk’s entire disgrace based on
Melvin Tumin, Catherine Steindler, as Nadel argues [419] for Exit Ghost’s
Jamie Logan, and on and on). Roth was also betrayed by his analyst, Dr.
Kleinschmidt, who published details of Roth’s case without permission and only thinly
veiled in 1967—but again, Roth also, in a sense, betrayed his analyst by
presenting him as Portnoy’s Complaint’s Dr. Spielvogel. This
grounding in anger, betrayal, disappointment along with the series of
psychological insights Nadel offers become the guiding threads to the
biography. Nadel explains in the introduction
that the text will be arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Lord
knows how anyone would ever be able to juggle the enormous amount of material
that Nadel gathered for this project but there were times when the lack of
chronology became slightly confusing, especially during the descriptions of
Roth’s second marriage, to Claire Bloom. In one moment we are with them in
London, Roth hates and absorbs the reserved British anti-Semitism that he will
go on to dramatize in The Counterlife, and then the next minute it’s a
decade later and they are splitting up. And then we’re ten years earlier again,
and there they are, gooey eyed arm and arm strolling down a stunning London
street. I am unsure how or even if it’s possible or preferable to write a
biography in a straight line, but there were just a few blips when cycling back
over things that had already happened disoriented me. That said, this deeply thought book is
rich with information and insight and will be a huge benefit to the scholarly
community mushrooming up around Roth’s works as well as to the general reader
interested in the riveting life of an important American writer. -
II - “Without
a novel I’m empty and not very happy” [422] Despite 31 books, Roth experienced
only two bestsellers, and neither were his own favorite: Portnoy’s Complaint
[1969] and Plot Against America [2004]. It is hard to imagine two
more different novels. Despite both being set in Newark, the tone, character,
and subject matter of these two texts are remarkably different. The 1969 novel
that launched Roth into literary superstardom tells the story of one young
Jewish American horny man, Alexander Portnoy, as he adventures through life in
New York and remembers masturbation absorbed tweendom in Newark. Thirty five
years later in a novel that many will see as both reflecting the Bush years and
presciently anticipating the horror of the quartet of Trump years, Plot
Against America will concoct a counterhistorical fascist U.S.A. But Nadel
reports that “Sabbath’s Theater, Roth’s angriest text, was his favorite”
[12]. Throughout his long career, Roth
consistently, and beginning very early on, wanted to exert control over the publication
and marketing of his books. He constantly kvetched that publishers were not
pushing hard enough to get his books out there and he took to “creating demand
[for Goodbye, Columbus [1959]] by calling up bookstores, asking for the
book, and then quickly hanging up” [110]. Nadel finds that Roth always acts as
the “promoter” [111]. Soon after Goodbye, Roth
experimented with both play writing and reviewing. His play “The Nice Jewish
Boy” enjoyed a “reading in 1964 at a workshop of the American Place Theater
with a then unknown actor, Dustin Hoffman, taking the lead” [167]. Roth also
sparred with LeRoi Jones over his [Roth’s] review of Jones’s play with Jones
responding that “Roth was feebleminded in his refusal ‘to see any Negro as a
man’” [167]. This is fascinating given how very many Black characters pop into
Roth’s novels, often just for brief cameo roles and rarely with any kind of
developed consciousness. Roth’s universe radically changed when
Portnoy’s Complaint was published in 1969 and made such an enormous
splash. Jason Epstein tells him: “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.” [210]. These sorts of grand proclamations were lost
on Roth’s parents and his mother, in particular, worried when Roth told her she
need not respond to what he anticipated would be multiple phone calls from
reporters. She wasn’t anxious about the reporters, those she could handle, she
was concerned that “her son seemed to be suffering from delusions of grandeur” [212].
Of course, this was not a psychological malady Roth suffered from in this
moment, at least. Reporters did come and Mr. and Mrs. Roth seemed comfortable
keeping them at bay. To avoid some of the storm Roth planned a cruise to Israel
for them during which Herman Roth famously handed out signed copies of Portnoy’s
Complaint “from Philip Roth’s father” [217]. Roth couldn’t go anywhere without
being hailed as Portnoy. The novel “allowed Roth to explode into a comic voice
of his own, discovering the freedom to express the id, ego, and superego,
sometimes all at once” [239]. Nadel offers here an excellent analysis of how
Roth, before Portnoy and especially in Letting Go, was trying to
be Henry James and not yet finding the aural and humorous landscape of Jewish
Newark that would eventually carry him so very far. -
III - “Narcissism
becomes a defense against anxiety” [186] Roth’s first marriage to Maggie [1959-63]
was preceded by several other relationships including with a Black woman whom
Nadel does not name but he notes that Roth was struck by her description of
others in her family who had passed [79]. This may have been one of the seeds
that bloomed into the sole passing (and sole developed Black) character in
Roth’s work, Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. When the novel came out in
2000 many scholars, myself included, thought that Silk was at least partly
based on Anatole Broyard, the literary critic and writer who was a man about
town in the heady Village days (see my Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of
Philip Roth for more than you’d ever want to know about Broyard). Roth became
seriously irritated and fought back in an open letter in The New Yorker claiming
that the novel was only based on the experience of his friend Melvin Tumin.
Nadel, though, vindicates scholars who found resonance with the life of Broyard
by uncovering, in a letter to John Updike, that Roth “implied that Anatole
Broyard was a partial inspiration for Silk” [432]. These kinds of archival
nuggets provide important and thickening correctives. Nadel offers many fascinating details
about Roth’s troubled marriage to Maggie. That she converted to Judaism [98],
for example, or that she nearly overdosed after she discovered Roth’s affair with
a student [101]. Nadel wonders aloud why Roth married this “needy and damaged
woman?” Nadel’s response? “He [Roth] wanted the mess, not the cleansing
experience of a stable, middle-class, college-educated woman from Short Hills.”
This, Nadel concludes, “is the Roth problem” [105]. Nadel will go on to
document many more relationships with unstable women and he locates a clear
pattern in Roth’s life [naturally mirrored in his fiction] of turning away from
women who want children, turning away from women who might actually not be so
very messy as Maggie, and, in this account, Claire as well. Maggie, it turns out, was not only, as
Roth would tell us in The Facts, the best fiction teacher he ever had
simply because you can’t make up tricks such as the now famous urine ploy, but
she also contributed her opinions about his early fiction. “Roth listens to her
views,” Nadel notes, “and she plays an important first-reader role in this
early stage of his career, which he later, somewhat maliciously, disregards” [141].
After Roth’s first divorce, but while the shadow of that relationship and all
its betrayals (on both sides) was still very present to him, Maggie was killed
in a car crash in Central Park in 1968. “Ironically, the rabbi who officiated
at the funeral was the one who was on the record as thinking Roth a menace to
the Jews for his writings” [192]. Like the urine, you just can’t make this
stuff up. What are the chances? For five years after Maggie, Roth was
attached to Ann Mudge. Exactly at the moment he would have been free to marry
her, he fears becoming embroiled in another marriage; and, indeed, he would not
marry again until 1990. “A fundamental anxiety,” Nadel finds, “and fear of a
long-term commitment likely leading to marriage created unrest or, as
Kleinschmidt might argue, a threat to his artistic anger, originating in
narcissism, which sustained his art” [196]. When Roth broke off the
relationship with Mudge, she responded by attempting suicide only to be found
after two unconscious days [197]. In a moment which makes Roth looks like even
more a schmuck than you might have thought him, Nadel reports that he raced
from the writer’s colony, Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, to New York City and Ann’s
hospital room only to tell her: “’Don’t think by doing this I’m going to marry
you’” [198]. Before reading Nadel’s biography I’d
of course read Claire Bloom’s account of her marriage to Roth and was looking here
for what the “other side” might reveal. Nadel paints Bloom as hysterical and
self-aggrandizing, and, despite the truth of some of her portrayals of Roth,
she consistently left out her failures as a caring wife. Late in life, involved
in a liaison with Susan Fox Rogers, a lesbian who “hadn’t slept with a man
since her early twenties” [411] (and thus became partially the model for The
Humbling’s Pegeen), Nadel reports that Rogers, “in contrast to Bloom whom,
he believed, would repeatedly match incompetence with hysteria in a moment of
need” [412] actually cared for Roth. An accurate sense of what Roth’s approximately
twenty-year relationship with Bloom was like is hard to find. The deep
disappointment she conveys in Leaving a Doll’s House combined with
Roth’s magnified fury at the public airing of his dirty laundry makes that
relationship impossible to grasp. Nadel does note that Roth “was in love
with Bloom” but also that “Bloom became scornful, resentful, and yet dependent
on her daughter, and over time Roth fell out of love” [287]. During the score
of years (from the early 1970s until 1995) they spent together, most of that
time was split between Bloom’s house in London and Roth’s residences in
Cornwall Bridge and/or the Upper West Side. As I read in this biography about
Bloom’s hysteria and her inability to care for Roth during his many illnesses,
I’m also seeing how forcefully Roth attempted to sunder mother and daughter. He
could not tolerate the noise any teenager is likely to generate and Anna
Steiger, Bloom’s child from her previous marriage to Rod Steiger, was kicked
out of the house by Roth so that he could write. I can only imagine how split
down the middle this might have made Bloom feel. As had Maggie, Bloom also
helped Roth write: she “would help him improvise dialogue for his books,
joining in role-playing games with him, and coming up with lines that would
appear in his fiction” [289]. In London, Roth and Bloom established a lively
social life with the painter R.B. Kitaj, the writer Ian McEwan, the playwright
Harold Pinter and his wife, Antonia Fraser, and many other literati / glitterati.
Fraser found that “Roth was always funny” [302] which gives us a different
sensation than a Roth who was always angry and fending off needy women. Nadel
diagnoses a “savior complex” [290] that he finds as part of the patterning with
many of Roth’s consorts. There’s also a lot of “ambivalence” [368]
in Roth’s relationship with his second wife. Nadel, indeed, finds that “It is
unclear: does she genuinely want to comfort him, and does he genuinely love
her?....Roth’s erratic behavior seemed to exploit Bloom” [372]. Indeed, as she
recounts in Leaving a Doll’s House and as Nadel summarizes, Roth became
vindictive as their divorce progressed and billed her for his hours, years
earlier, when he had helped write a play in which Bloom performed [375]. “Both Bloom and Roth rewrote history,”
Nadel concludes [380], in finding that the couple’s letters and other documents
unveil much more positive aspects of their relationship than they both publicly
revealed after it was over. -
IV - “Indignation
became performance” [69] Nadel finds that Roth’s “constant
challenge” was in locating a stable sense of self. “He pursued that challenge
through performances on the page and in person. Performance became both an
escape from the self and the means to find it” [331]. Alfred Kazin feels when
in Roth’s company that “The cleverness, the sharpness, the continual edge somehow
turn an evening, to say nothing of his fiction, into performance. There
are no purely meditative, unexpected moments, no reflection” [cited in
Nadel : 341]. Kazin was not alone in finding Roth difficult. And yet Nadel
does include many moments when Roth “showed patience and empathy” [394], as for
example, when he helped a student who had had a mental breakdown, when he
offered huge sums of money to friends who needed help, when he bailed out his
brother Sandy who left a thankless corporate life for an emotionally rich but
materially poor life as a painter, and on and on. Nadel, who penned biographies of
Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, and other major figures so is no stranger to the
process, is well aware of the particular challenges of writing a biography of
Roth. Roth feuded with several would-be biographers before settling on Blake
Bailey, so Nadel’s biography is the “unofficial” one. In the aftermath of the
enormous scandal Bailey’s biography caused when the publisher, Norton, canceled
the book due to accusations of rape and sexual abuse against Bailey, I wonder
what Roth would have said to Bailey. I’m imagining this: 5 May 2021 Bard College Cemetery Dear Mr. Bailey, You are quite right. Not winning the
Nobel in my lifetime is a thorn in my side. I still feel it, here in the dank
sienna toned earth. If I can’t have the Nobel—and who is to say they won’t make
an exception? 2017, the year the committee was roiled with a sex scandal could
have been my year! If Jean-Claude had been able to keep his miserable putz in
his pants The Nobel would have been mine! I chose you, shaygets, to write my biography because I wanted a LEGACY! Which
part of legacy did you not understand? Sure, sure, I joked at my eightieth
birthday party, which, by the way, was studded with all the literary stars
issuing lovingly crafted homages to my enduring influence. I was just joking,
you know, in my favorite novel of all time, Sabbath’s
Theater, when my most alter-egoish character, Sabbath, imagines his
gravestone: “Beloved
Whoremonger, Seducer, Sodomist, Abuser of Women, Destroyer of Morals, Ensnarer
of Youth, Uxoricide, Suicide.” But now, because you also couldn’t
keep your ridiculous little putz in your pants this is what people will think
of me! I was merely being a “polyamorous humorist” [50]—thank you for at least
getting that right! “Roth
would always have a weakness for vulnerable young women” [759]. Did you really
have to say that? Projection, pure projection, and if I’d been able to read the
galleys before dying I would have put “keep it to yourself” in red in the
margins. Now
no one will read the magisterial, satisfyingly fat biography all embossed in
gold with me on the cover, my thin ankle poking out of my nice suit, backlit,
reflective posture a little like The
Thinker. Classy, the whole book. And wonderfully well written. Which, now,
only sharpens the thorn in my side. If the book had to be unprinted, could it
not at least have been crappy? Damn it. Bailey,
you’ve ruined me. But perhaps, like Frankenstein, I’ve created the monster who
slayed me. Philip Roth That’s what I imagine Roth would have
said to Bailey. What would he say to Nadel? Of that, I am not so sure. Nadel’s
Roth is angry, vengeful, manipulative, and not very different from many of his
own literary creations. But Roth would have appreciated Nadel’s comprehensive research,
and this thoughtful book bursting with insight. Nadel combed through
zillions of letters, drafts housed at the Library of Congress, interviews,
memoirs, and of course Roth’s more than thirty works themselves. I suspect Roth
would have relished the psychoanalytic approach Nadel adopts.
All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
