Lock away your liver (Getty)

In 1975, Philip Roth made another trip to Czechoslovakia, where he had already gone to help dissident writers in the Soviet-occupied homeland of his beloved Kafka. This time, after he left, âthe shit hit the fanâ, with secret-police raids on his contacts and gruelling interrogations. âWhat is Roth doing here in Czechoslovakia?â the spooks demanded of his friend Ivan KlĂma. âDonât you read his books?â KlĂma answered. âHe is here for the girls.â
For many critics â sometimes, admittedly, for Roth himself â that retort seems to account for Rothâs presence on the planet. Heâs here for the girls. The erotic and emotional melodrama that fills the work, and fuelled the life, of the novelist from the Jewish suburbs of Newark, New Jersey enthralled, titillated and outraged readers from his 1959 debut, Goodbye, Columbus, through the epochal scandal of Portnoyâs Complaint a decade later, to the farewell verdicts after his death, aged 85, in May 2018. Hardly unjust, you might think, for an author who as a University of Chicago student in the mid-1950s had defined his ideal life as âbibliography by day, women by nightâ. Yet dreams, like deeds, have consequences. In 2014 he could lament after âthirty-one books of a writing career⊠the truly indelible mark that I made is as a dirty writerâ.
Inevitably, the âdirty writerâ and his tangled web of relationships has come to the fore in responses to the monumental authorised life produced â a mere three yearâs after its subjectâs passing â by Blake Bailey. True, it would take a heart of stone and brain of silicon to read Philip Roth: The Biography and not be swept up into the 24/7 floorshow-cum-car crash of the writerâs sexual life, from the two catastrophic marriages (to waitress-secretary Maggie Martinson and English actress Claire Bloom), through stormy long-haul affairs to passing dalliances with partners who stretch from Texan lasses who need to ask him âWhatâs fascism?â to Ava Gardner herself. With Jackie Kennedy, things never quite worked out, even though the widowed First Lady did apparently try.
Baileyâs narrative supplies bulging boxes of evidence for both prosecution and defence. Should the priapic titan from Newark go to âfeminist prisonâ (âyou serve twenty years to life,â he kvetched to co-offender Saul Bellow) or be remembered as at least (so he put it to Alison Lurie) ânot just a shit (when I am being one) but an interesting and intelligent shitâ? A shit he could certainly be, whether in the Strindberg-like horrors, both inflicted and endured, of his marriage to Bloom or the casual predations of his later-life pick-ups. You cheer for the dames who fought back, like the prospect he cruised in a Connecticut bar and blithely advised to read his spectacularly filthy (and deeply accomplished) 1995 novel Sabbathâs Theater. When she then stood him up, he rang: ââYou are never to call me again,â she said, and hung up.â Thatâs the spirit.
The best defence, perhaps, lies in Baileyâs roster of distinguished women whom Roth (genuinely) befriended and supported, from Lurie herself to Edna OâBrien, Hermione Lee, Mia Farrow â he even furnished the disaffected teenage Ronan with a reading list â and Zadie Smith. In her inaugural Philip Roth Lecture at Newark Public Library (to which he donated all his books), Smith cut to the core of Rothâs emancipatory, taboo-busting power. âI stole Portnoyâs liberties long ago,â Smith said. âHe is part of the reason, when I write, that I do not try to create positive black role models for my black readers, and more generally have no interest in conjuring ideal humans for my readers to emulateâ. Even in 1959, some Jewish readers of his early stories found in them a shanda fur die goyim â shaming ammunition for gentiles. Rothâs shamelessness printed a ticket to freedom for his heirs.
Faced with this career-long carnival of unruly desire, it sounds bizarre to switch attention from gender politics to geopolitics â the sort of soporific stunt pulled by the blockhead professors he loved to guy. Even sex, though, takes place in time. Yet Baileyâs supremely readable chronicle opens out into the world beyond the bedroom arenas where Rothâs gladiatorial couplings unfold. As Bailey suggests, Roth and his male literary peers came to maturity in a post-Second World War United States coming to terms with its role as a consumer cornucopia at home and global superpower abroad. Born in 1933, in the darkest hour of the Depression, he grew up in the belly of a strong young beast. America’s new hegemony showered at least some of its citizens with unimagined goodies, and bestrode the Cold War stage like an adolescent colossus. He and his high-achieving coevals were children of the long boom that saw US GDP soar from $243 billion in 1947 to $2.8 trillion in 1980.
The fruits of plenty were unevenly spread. But this age of gold shone on striving millions â many, like Roth, the offspring of fairly recent immigrant families â as median household incomes rose (in real, inflation-adjusted terms) from $34,710 in 1954 to $62,153 in 1973. Despite the Vietnam imbroglio, racial unrest in the cities and youth revolt, US unemployment dropped to a historic low of 3.4 per cent just as Roth published Portnoy in 1969. The suburban plenty whose seamy side Roth unpicked reflected in miniature the zenith of US affluence and authority. If you want to understand why a serious literary novelist (albeit one with a satirical, scurrilous side) could hit such peaks of fame, look at the annual figures for the award of US first degrees. They shot up from 136,000 in 1945 to 1,094,000 in 1990, with a hike from 520,000 t0 840,000 between 1965 and 1970 alone.
Wealthier, better educated, better informed â as seriously written city and regional newspapers still competed with the TV networks â this new mass public amplified Rothâs voice, and his glory. The paperback of Portnoy sold 3.5 million within five years.
At least until his late-career reflorescence, Roth was aware that he stuck to the narrow patch he knew. âI dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole,â he said. Reading Bailey, though, you grasp that this seemingly narrow shaft â Newark, Jewish suburbia, upward mobility, male sexual hubris and nemesis, American success and its discontents, time, age and mortality â contains not just of bedrooms, but boardrooms and war-rooms. In 1997, the masterly American Pastoral marked Rothâs second coming as a full-fledged historical novelist of epic, not just domestic, scope. Its narrator, Rothâs regular alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, reflects that the tragic hero âSwedeâ Levov must have been âbaffledâ by the question: âHow had he become historyâs playthingâ. Even as they yearn, strive and plot, with the next lay, the next game, the next raise in view, Rothâs heroes remain historyâs playthings.
He thought of calling the great turn-of the-21st-century trilogy that began with American Pastoral and continued with I Married a Communist and The Human Stain âBlindsidedâ. Its aghast protagonists find themselves ambushed and felled by unforeseen outcomes of the postwar American Dream of prosperity, progress and self-realisation. As early as his baseball fable The Great American Novel in 1973, Roth understood that he was telling mythic stories about the rise and fall of a superpower â not just the ups and downs of little guys. Baseball might serve, he said, as âa means to dramatise the struggle between the benign national myth of itself that a great power prefers to perpetuate, and the relentlessly insidious, very nearly demonic realityâ.
For writers, birth dates matter. Always in Rothâs sight lay the just-senior writers who had experienced the Second World War as young adults: Norman Mailer who served in the Pacific; Gore Vidal, a naval officer; Rothâs idol Saul Bellow, a Merchant Marine volunteer; or Joseph Heller, a B-25 bombardier. In contrast, he and 1930s-born contemporaries such as John Updike and Don DeLillo were (Bailey argues) âabstemious children of the Depressionâ. They eschewed grand gestures, âkept their noses to the grindstoneâ, and maximised their productivity. Not every one of these Depression wunderkinder stood an equal chance. Toni Morrison, born in 1931, only published her first novel in 1970 â however, her job as a New York fiction editor had to a degree lowered the formidable obstacles arising from her race and sex.
Roth was a compartmentaliser. His proneness to excess applied strictly in the bedroom. In a taste-defying metaphor, he compared the male sexual adventurers of the early Sixties to the GIs who vanquished Nazism: âI sometimes think of my generation of men as the first wave of determined D-Day invaders, over whose bloody, wounded carcasses the flower children subsequently stepped ashoreâ. With sex, Roth went over the top. Otherwise, he maintained his work-rate at a punishingly high level, like any harassed postwar corporate executive. Friends and lovers comment on his âmonkish habitsâ, especially after he bought (cash down, $110,000) a farmhouse in Warren, Connecticut and shut himself away â girlfriends excepted â for seasons on end. He dubbed it âThe Fiction Factoryâ.
From their fiction factories, Roth and his Depression-born buddies delivered the goods: year after year, book after book, high-minded rivals to the suited stiffs at IBM, Standard Oil or Chrysler. (Roth, with his 31 volumes, even envied Updike his âfucking fluencyâ.) The kid from Newark, whose adored father Herman had served the Metropolitan Life insurance company for 36 years, adhered to a thoroughly bourgeois model of hard graft. His progress traces an all-American postwar gradient of social mobility, professional attainment, career milestones and late-life plaudits. âWeâre hicks,â Roth said of his group, âItâs just because weâre such hicks that weâve all become so sophisticated.â Ascent meant vindication, too. In Herman Rothâs day, Bailey reveals, a Jew could not hope to advance beyond branch manager at Met Life.
His son Philip rose along with Mad Men America, in an age of aspiration, reward and newly-bestowed entitlement â an entitlement that Roth drew on in the currency of sex. The money came in handy, too. His advances and fees soon skyrocketed. In 1968, Roth reckoned his income as $827,000 â more than $6 million today. Slacker times (relatively) ensued, but by 1989 his new agent Andrew Wylie could strike a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster for $1.8 million. In the heyday of corporate America, this was high literature as big business. Roth gave much of the dosh away: charitably, to exes, girlfriends, chums, or family; and, commercially, to the myriad doctors and hospitals who treated his chronic back pain and worsening heart conditions. That he could earn it in the first place shows how Americaâs postwar high tide lifted even the toughest, rudest critic of the puritan and philistine mainstream.
But all good things â and bad things â come to end. (After an 80th birthday gala hosted by Edna OâBrien, Roth wrote that âthe meaning of life is that it stopsâ.) Decline, private and public, shadows his later fiction, often given burnt-out, strife-torn form in the recession-wrecked city of Newark. And with that geopolitical fall came the discredit and opprobrium that now attached to the kind of cocksure strutting that Roth the man (not Roth the novelist) had sometimes indulged. Shame once more dogged his heels, above all after Claire Bloom published her damning memoir Leaving a Dollâs House. One TV show, unimprovably, dubbed it âher thermonuclear dish-allâ. Bailey draws on Rothâs unpublished â295-page rebuttalâ of her accusations. Yes, 295-page.
Roth might deplore âthis media eagerness to find culpability in matters large and smallâ. But it wasnât just personal. The toppling of alpha male entitlement, literary and otherwise, partnered the eclipse of the alpha superpower as Cold War âvictoryâ failed to stop the rot. Not for nothing did Roth call one of his final, frail novellas The Humbling. At least his gifts remained undimmed when it came to fantasy solutions for the American fix that wore a MAGA cap. In 2004, he spookily modelled the lure of Trumpish populism in the historical dystopia of The Plot Against America. When the real thing came along, he called the orange one a âmassive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniacâ. Even Nixon got off lighter.
In recent times, the reputation of Roth, Mailer, Updike et al has come to resemble a sort of crumbling rustbelt in itself. Their more modest American (and British) successors tend to play nicely, move in packs and â above all â stay in their appointed lanes. The upshot is a more wholesome if less ambitious literary scene â more Brooklyn artisan bakery than some flaming, roaring, polluting steel plant in Pennsylvania (or New Jersey). Baileyâs mammoth testament may, or may not, push the graph of Roth stock up a little. In any case, his biography shows that it took, not a village, but a clumsily confident behemoth of a victorious nation, to raise these wayward, favoured children. These flawed literary giants could grow so tall because a one-off confluence of historical forces nourished them. Their empire has now toppled. How are Chinaâs best-known novelists behaving in private? We might soon need to know.
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SubscribeOne of the great American writers. Hated because he was ashamed neither of being a man nor a Jew, and wonderfully portrayed the nuance, complexities and absurdities of both labels and identities clearly. When women or gay people write stuff about sex, they are celebrating their sexuality. When a man does so, he is a misogynist.
Diana Athill said that her biggest career mistake as a publisher was to turn down Philip Roth. It takes a genius to recognise another. As a writer Roth is head and shoulders above the chic-lit that goes for good writing in the Guardian, written by envy-ridden third-raters
That is one great line: “When a man does so, he is a misogynist” Bravo!
I’ve been a fan since my 20s, so the late-stage, post-mortem opprobrium that Roth is suffering from critics who couldn’t hold a candle to the ferocity of his prose is as unwelcome as it’s predictable. I thought this a bang-on review of what makes him so readable, especially the comparison of modern-day ‘artisan bakery’ novelists, whose output is (here we go again) as unwelcomely twee as it’s predictable, compared to the belching, powerful blast of Roth. Weirdly it was he and not the others who caught my taste – I could never get on with Bellow et al. Chacun etc.
Apart from his literary merits, his prescience is astonishing. It’s pushing it to say that The Plot Against America presaged Trump – it’s much more chilling – but I know what you mean. But The Human Stain describes the empty mess of racially-driven identity politics precisely.
(And if you read Portnoy at the right age, you’ll laugh yourself sick.)
Great. Thank you.
I must go back to Roth again.
Canât you get porn on the internet? Rothâs filth isnât even funny, itâs just American garbage and his non porn isnât interesting. If you need filth in your life read Simon Raven instead, at least his understanding of the ridiculousness of lefty politics and his sense of humour is excellent, and heâs British.
Ha, ha, you might be right. I haven’t read so much Roth. I thought ‘The Human Stain’ was excellent, a prescient look at cancel culture. But I found ‘American Pastoral’ to be massively overrated, and ‘Exit Ghost’ was just nothing.
Hear hear!
How much Roth have you read?
Not much from the sound of it. I’m actually surprised she didn’t demand that all of Roth’s work be cancelled. Still, she did give Simon Raven a rather nice backhanded compliment.
Always enjoy your, outside the echo chamber, posts, love the vehemence of them too. Even if I do not agree I like hearing the goat bleat amongst the sheep baaaas.
I’ve only read “The Human Stain” , which I liked despite the “over-rated NY intellectual who isn’t really that interesting” vibe and thought I might like other Roth novels. Don’t think I’ll get round to them now.
Same with me, Brendan. I thought it was a wonderful novel. Unlike you, I would like to read some of Roth’s other works, starting with “The Plot Against America.” My dad served in a bomber in the Second World War. He said that prior to the war the glorification of the Germans from people like Lindbergh almost defied belief, like they were not men but supermen. Roth did the world a favour by reminding people of it.
I thought it excellent, and terrifying (thoâ I disagree with him about Trump)
In terms of balance, The New Reviewâs 22 March piece concerning this rebarbative, stereotypical writer is of value.
Claire Bloom might have agreed.
âââ Women in this book are forever screeching, berating, flying into a rage, and storming off, as if their emotions exist solely for the purpose of sapping a manâs creative energies.âââ
Philip Roth reviews his own biographer:
Aren’t we all here for the girls? Even the girls seem to be here for the girls now