Few people can agree about Philip Roth. His former wife, the British actress
Claire Bloom, depicted him as “cruel, erratic and spectacularly
manipulative”. His friends say they could wish for no better company.
Roth’s fellow Jewish-Americans have denounced him as “a self- hating Jew” for
books such as Portnoy’s Complaint, a wildly funny vision of Jewishness as a
perpetual circumcision of the psyche. But critics say he is arguably the
world’s greatest living novelist, with awards to prove it.
At 71, Roth has produced a sensation with his 21st novel, The Plot Against
America, that casts the post-September 11 era in a chilling new light. It is
a literary event that crowns his trilogy of epic books about America
culminating in The Human Stain (poorly adapted last year as a film starring
Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins).
On the face of it, Roth’s latest story has nothing to do with conspiracy
theories or the terrorist attack on the twin towers. It is set in the 1940s
when history is tweaked to elevate the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh,
a Nazi sympathiser, as a US president who signs non-aggression treaties with
Germany and Japan. His Jewish dispersal programme leads inevitably to
attacks on Jewish stores in America’s Kristallnacht.
The Plot Against America transcends the “what if” genre by virtue of some
compelling flesh and blood characters — the Roth family through whom the
story is filtered. Here are Roth’s staid parents and elder brother, whose
reactions to fearful events are chronicled by seven-year-old Philip. Here is
the Jewish neighbourhood of Newark, New Jersey, where he grew up.
It is an effective and sobering device in a book that has disturbing echoes of
Washington’s more recent curtailment of civil liberties in the war against
terror. This attack on constitutional rights is the real plot against
America, Roth seems to be saying.
Roth is both an intensely self- revealing writer — although he disputes exact
autobiographical matches in his books — and one of the most fiercely
private. He writes obsessively at his studio in the woods of Connecticut,
accustomed to work standing up until recent surgery on his back and
arthritis laid him low.
Spartan, monkish, cloistered with a pen, paper and an Anglepoise lamp, he
reminded Hermione Lee, one of his biographers, of a character in his novel
The Ghost Writer who ate half an egg for breakfast, eschewing the remainder
as excessive.
The critic Al Alvarez, who met him recently, described him thus: “Roth’s face
is lined now, his mouth has tightened and his springy hair has turned grey,
but he still looks like an athlete — tall and lean, with broad shoulders and
a small head.”
Roth became reclusive after the outrageous success and scandal of his 1969
bestseller Portnoy’s Complaint, the sexual confessions of a guilt-ridden
Jewish youth trying to reconcile his natural urges with his repressive
background. Chiming with the anarchic 1960s, it was the first novel to turn
masturbation into comedy.
He re-emerged in London as the boyfriend of Bloom; for 12 years in the 1970s
and 1980s they were among the most sought-after guests on the north London
dinner-party circuit. Roth became touchy at what he perceived as British
anti-semitism and disliked our stuffy manners. “Did you notice how many
times people say ‘thank you’ when they are in a shop?” he complained.
His four-year marriage in New York to Bloom ended acrimoniously in 1994. The
seeds were sown, by her account, when she discovered the manuscript for his
novel Deception (1990). It featured a dull, middle-aged actress named Claire
who lived with a philandering writer named Philip.
Unconvinced by his protestations that it was fiction and fearing humiliation,
she forced him to remove her name. In her autobiography, Leaving a Doll’s
House, she accused Roth of pitting her against Anna, her daughter from her
first marriage to the actor Rod Steiger, and persuading her to evict the
then teenager from their London home. When they split, he demanded the
return of everything he had ever given Bloom, plus £100 an hour for the
“five or six hundred hours” he had spent going over scripts with her, she
said.
Her denunciation did not stop his sour portrait of a snobbish Anglo-Jewish
actress in I Married a Communist (1998). Nor did it detract from his
reputation as a literary giant. Among his honours, the National Medal of
Arts was pinned on him by President Bill Clinton and a multi-volume of his
collected works is to be enshrined in the Library of America, establishing
him as one of America’s literary immortals.
His novels such as Zuckerman Unbound, Patrimony, Operation Shylock and
Sabbath’s Theater obsessively mined the themes of sex, writing, being Jewish
in America and the interplay between fact and fiction. The Plot Against
America is a tribute to his parents “in their prime”. His father Herman was
an insurance agent for Met Life and his mother Bess was a housewife and the
family rock. Along with their elder son Sandy the family was affectionate,
close-knit and emotional.
Their Jewish neighbours in Weequahic, a working-class area of Newark, never
wore skullcaps, beards or side locks, in Roth’s recollection. “The mission
was to live here, not there,” he said. “There was no there. If you asked
your grandmother where she came from, she’d say, ‘Don’t worry about it. I
forgot already’.”
Young Roth was “a good Jewish boy”, slow to lose his inhibitions. Norman
Podhoretz, arch-conservative editor of Commentary magazine, recalled that in
1957 Roth complained to a mutual friend that he “disapproved of how
foul-mouthed I was”. Podhoretz added: “As things turned out, I could not
have held a candle, or even a matchstick, to the future author of Portnoy’s
Complaint.”
Roth was a bright child who sailed through school and then college in
Lewisberg, Pennsylvania, with flying colours before getting his MA from the
University of Chicago. A spell in the army was halted by a spinal injury and
he returned to Chicago to teach English but dropped out after one term to
write.
He was 26 when he achieved fame with Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a novella and
five short stories that followed the life of a Jewish middle-class family.
Rabbis objected to the sneering “gripes of Roth”, but it won the National
Book Award and was made into a film starring Richard Benjamin and Ali
MacGraw.
Ten years later, after writing a brooding novel about moral ambiguity called
Letting Go, he hit gold with Portnoy’s Complaint. Segments published in
magazines had created such anticipation that he earned almost $1m in
publisher’s advances.
He went into hiding at Yaddo, a writers’ colony in upstate New York, where he
also sought to distance himself from his work by inventing alter-ego
narrators such as the tough talking Nathan Zuckerman and the studious David
Kepesh, who were to feature in his books.
He became further submerged after falling in with a group of Czech writers
while on holiday in Prague in 1972. Their problems, in the aftermath of the
Prague spring of 1968, brought him down to earth: “They made me very
conscious of the difference between the private ludicracy of being a writer
in America and the harsh ludicrousness of being a writer in eastern Europe.”
Back in New York, hanging out with Czech exiles, he felt that he had “left
all this Portnoy crap behind ”.
At the age of 60 he set out to emulate his heroes William Faulkner and John
Updike with a more regional approach to depicting American society. In an
acclaimed trilogy he also widened his scope by taking on such beefy issues
as crime (American Pastoral), McCarthyism (I Married a Communist) and race
(The Human Stain).
Writing is the consuming activity of his life. “If it were taken away from me
I think I would die, probably,” he said last year. One commentator has
called Roth’s recent output the most prolific late blossoming in literary
history.
His fans will be glad to hear that he shows no signs of slowing down.
