Philip roth, p.72
Philip Roth, page 72
A measure of Roth’s self-involvement, and/or a kind of selective naiveté, was his inability to grasp at the time that Bloom meant to do him harm. (“Who would want to hurt Amasa Delano?” he’d mock himself many years later, paraphrasing Melville’s “Benito Cereno”: “Who would murder Amasa Delano?” wonders Amasa Delano, unwittingly menaced by mutinous slaves aboard the San Dominick.) Mia Farrow remembered that he still kept a picture of Bloom in his studio, and often spoke tenderly of the way he’d tried and tried, always, to coax this terribly insecure person into giving her best performance. He laughed when Manea worriedly related a rumor that Bloom was writing about their relationship: “Norman, she cannot write,” said Roth, who assumed such a book would be a sequel to Limelight and After—perhaps about “the interesting nature of a marriage between an actress and a writer,” he surmised, “which was not without precedent (Chekhov and Olga Knipper).” After all: How could such a book be scurrilous? What about the money he’d given her? The teleplays he’d written? The endless rehearsing and other career assistance? What about that genial meeting at Sarabeth’s, and the friendly notes that followed?
Roth spent almost the entire summer of 1996 in Connecticut, working on American Pastoral, with Golier and occasionally Ross Miller his only weekend visitors. Neither friend was apt to hear the Manhattan gossip about the galleys of Leaving a Doll’s House that were already circulating. Still, it appears Roth at least got the gist of David Streitfeld’s piece in The Washington Post on August 30: Doll’s House, Streitfeld revealed, “is in large part about Philip Roth: master novelist and master manipulator, a deeply troubled fellow who likes to make his loved ones part of his madness.” When Streitfeld described the book’s contents to him, Conarroe assayed a loyal and politic response: “Claire is a wonderful person and a great actress, but not necessarily a totally accurate observer. I hope anyone who reads this book will read it not only with a grain of salt, but a whole tablespoonful.” One of the book’s dedicatees, however, assured Streitfeld that her friend Claire was all but incapable of even the mildest exaggeration: “She’s an amazingly accurate reporter,” said Francine du Plessix Gray.
On September 3, Roth sent a terse memo to his closest friends, giving out his new telephone numbers in New York and Connecticut: “THESE NUMBERS ARE UNLISTED. PLEASE DO NOT GIVE THEM TO ANYONE.” He also castigated Conarroe for talking to Streitfeld, though of course his friend had only meant to be helpful; nevertheless Roth had repeatedly asked him and others not to cooperate with the media in any form, especially during his breakup with Bloom.
Though Roth clearly had at least secondhand knowledge of the Streitfeld piece, he later claimed he hadn’t twigged to the true nature of Bloom’s memoir until September 17, when he was in New York to see his physical therapist, Lori Monson. As he was leaving, she remarked, “I wouldn’t look at the Times today if I were you.” Puzzled, he walked to the City Athletic Club (“Jewish guys,” Roth glossed) on Fifty-fourth and Sixth to take a swim, relaxing afterward in the sauna. Two men were expostulating outside the door—“Is he gonna let her get away with this shit?”—when Roth came out to say hello. “What you gonna do about her?” one man asked. “Who’s ‘her’?” “You know what I’m talking about!” Roth didn’t, though he declined to pursue the matter then and there. He said goodbye and proceeded up Central Park West toward his apartment on Seventy-seventh. Along the way, at last, he got the picture. Coming toward him was his and Bloom’s old friend Barbara Epstein; expecting the usual hug and hello, Roth was startled when the woman hurried past him without a word. At this point he thought to buy the Times. Claire Bloom Looks Back in Anger at Philip Roth, read the headline of an article, by Dinitia Smith, about Bloom’s forthcoming memoir. Roth’s blurry scan of the first few sentences picked out key phrases: “self-centered misogynist . . . the gossip is considerable. . . .”
He stopped there and dumped the newspaper into the trash; then he went to his apartment, packed a few clothes, got his car out of the garage, and drove an hour and a half to the Jersey Shore—stopping en route to visit his parents’ graves and pull himself together. “I thought: ‘This whole life has been dedicated to serious matters. . . . And that I should wind up in the fucking New York Times saying “misogynist” and who knows what else is in there. And also there’s the book to come . . .’ ” Roth took a room at a bed-and-breakfast in Spring Lake (a few miles south of his childhood haunts in Bradley Beach), and, after a day or so, left messages for Sandy, Wylie, and Golier (the last, under the circumstances, was frantic with worry by then), letting them know he’d gone away for a bit and was fine. For the next four days he did nothing but “walk and dive, walk and dive,” eating his meals on the dock at Ollie Klein’s in Belmar. At night he listened to the ocean a block away from his room. “I lay on the bed and I thought ‘They can’t touch you. They can’t touch you.’ In one day I was over it. I was centered.” Which is to say, he was soon ready to collect his things in New York and hole up in Connecticut for a long while, working and seeing nobody but Julia and Ross; in a larger sense, he never got over it.
IN HER PREFACE TO Leaving a Doll’s House, Bloom described her marriage to Roth as “the most important relationship of [her] life” (not to be confused with her greatest love, who, she noted on page 93, was Richard Burton‡). As Bloom recognized when she first saw Chekhov’s Three Sisters, at age twelve, certain women are apt to spend their lives in pursuit of a “lost father,” no matter how “tyrannical” such a figure tends to be. Ultimately, like Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House, Bloom would be free of the final and most darkly formidable of the many father figures in her life, but the journey was painful, protracted, and very repetitive. “You have already had Portnoy’s complaint,” Gore Vidal advised her back in 1975, referring to her recent divorce from a man who’d exploited her sexually and otherwise, Hilly Elkins. “Do not involve herself with Portnoy.” In lucidly rueful retrospect, Bloom realized her friend had been right—a conclusion she might have reached in the beginning, on the basis of Roth’s novels, which “provided all one needed to know” about the kind of philandering, “Machiavellian” fiasco the author proved to be. Such, anyway, was Leaving a Doll’s House.
Most of the reviewers were sympathetic to the story Bloom told. The word “harrowing” recurred a lot. Marion Winik wrote, in the Los Angeles Times (“Mrs. Portnoy’s Complaint”), that there was “nothing funny” about the “mess” that is Philip Roth—who, it so happened, was Winik’s “favorite living writer,” though she was hardly surprised by his human failings: “Tall, moody, self-absorbed intellectuals with their sardonic insights have long been a disappointment to me in the romance department.” Perhaps the most wholehearted affirmation came from Patricia Bosworth in the Times Book Review. Naturally she found the book “harrowing,” though she commended Bloom’s effort to be “fair to Mr. Roth, perhaps too fair. And too often she portrays herself as a victim, which is exasperating; she obviously is very strong; otherwise, she would not have survived.”
Daphne Merkin, however, writing in The New Yorker, wondered at Bloom’s lack of “any sense of moral accountability. . . . In her own eyes, she remains forever a passive being fatally attracted to men who issue demonic commands she has no choice but to obey.”§ As for Bloom’s alleged fairness despite her victimhood, Merkin noted that Roth and others had proved quite useful to her career: “One can discern, through the pious gloss Bloom puts on the events of her life, the shrewd maneuverings of a stage brat”—a sentiment Zoë Heller echoed more bluntly in the London Review of Books: “beneath the guise of a bashed butterfly, a scorpion.”
And yet, in his feature article for New York magazine (cover caption: “A Hell of a Marriage”), Peter J. Smith pointed out that Bloom’s “most striking” traits were “her obvious kindness, sincerity, and eagerness to please. . . . [T]his blistering and ultimately very sad account exposes the artist as a spectacularly troubled and manipulative man, prone to recurring somatic and mental illness; someone who, in the words of one of Bloom’s friends, ‘is basically impossible, and should not have relationships.’ ” As evidence of her vaunted fairness, Bloom pronounced the prepublication Times piece “vile” because it gave a false impression of her book’s harshness, when in fact she’d tried very hard to emphasize “that there were good times as well as bad, that it was a long and splendid relationship that in the end was marred.” Smith added: “Later an acquaintance of Bloom’s suggests that she was ‘having you on,’ claiming that Bloom, when informed about the Times’s early and unusual coverage, was ‘chortling.’ ”
The nadir was a spot about Bloom on the prime-time Dateline NBC. Roth was alerted by his Silver Hill psychiatrist, Dr. Bloch, who phoned to warn him that he’d just escorted a film crew off the grounds when they asked his permission to shoot “Roth’s room”; the crew was now filming from a nearby road. This was followed by a letter from Dennis Murphy:
I’m an NBC News reporter with the network’s Dateline program and over the weekend, in London, Claire gave us a taped interview, which we expect to air in a couple of weeks. Had there been an 11th chapter, Smilesburger’s whisperers couldn’t have done a better job in the loshon hora [“evil tongue,” i.e., derogatory speech] department.
Claire believes that you will never respond to her book or the accompanying publicity and though you are one who clearly knows how to be silent, patient and unprovoked in the most unsettling circumstances, I hope she’s wrong?
Would you consider a videotaped interview? . . .
“He’d do it to me,” Claire tells us.
Would you?
Roth didn’t reply, though he belatedly retained a lawyer, Russell Brooks of Milbank Tweed, who read Doll’s House on his behalf (“for the sake of my health and sanity,” said Roth, “I didn’t want to”), and wrote a letter to Bloom, dated November 5, observing that her book was defamatory and demanding a retraction, absent which Roth had “authorized us to take whatever legal action is necessary.” Six days later, during her WNYC radio interview with Leonard Lopate, Bloom spoke with unwonted tenderness of her “marvelous marriage” to Roth, with whom she’d had “the best relationship of her life.” On the thirteenth Brooks sent a tape of this interview to an NBC lawyer, David Sternlicht, advising him to compare it with their own interview, “and then consider whether NBC News can rely on Ms. Bloom’s statements to Dateline to be accurate.” Roth’s former lover and Penn student, Laurie Geisler Donovan, was now a senior vice president and general counsel for the network; as she regretfully informed Roth over the phone, they’d discussed aborting the segment but decided it was too late to fill the November 15 slot.
“I was the victim of a dreadful accident,” Bloom announces at the beginning of her Dateline spot. “What caused it, I don’t know. It’s like being hit by a truck.” Flashing lights, a blaring car horn. “I despise what he did to me. I despise the person who did it.” An announcer explains: “It’s her thermonuclear dish-all about her ex-husband, Philip Roth, that has smart circles buzzing. . . . [Roth] is such a towering intellect, he could be the Michael Jordan of the American literary scene.” The actual interview builds with like subtlety to “the most shocking story” in Bloom’s book, when Roth handed her a letter demanding that her daughter move out. “No, sorry, got to stop there,” Bloom says, after a faltering attempt to discuss “the worst moment of [her] life”: “Can’t do this.” (“He might see it differently,” she breezily remarked of the Anna episode on WNYC. “That’s what happened, but he might have his own reasons that he would give you, I’m sure.”) “You’ve hit him with a hay-maker,” the Dateline interviewer congratulates her at last.
BLOOM [girlishly covering her mouth]: What’s a “haymaker”?
INTERVIEWER: It’s a full roundhouse punch that puts you back on your bum.
BLOOM: Oh, great! . . . That’s exactly the way I feel. He hit me with a haymaker; I fought back.
The day after the show, which Roth never watched, he went to the Cornwall Bridge general store to pick up his daily paper, and the store’s owner, Ed Baird, took him aside: “I didn’t believe those things they said about you, Phil. I know you, and I didn’t believe a word.”
Meanwhile Milbank Tweed had compiled a “Preliminary List of Possibly Defamatory Statements,” seventy-two in all, which, if false, were libelous. A few of these were highlighted in Brooks’s November 5 letter to Bloom:
■Mr. Roth is misogynic [sic] and has an innately hostile disposition toward women. These statements are patently false. . . .
■Mr. Roth demanded that you oust your daughter Anna from her family home in London to live in a student hostel in a poor and dangerous neighborhood [“one of the least salubrious,” Bloom had written] of London. In fact, your daughter left home to live in the London residence facility of her London college—the Guild Hall School of Music, and, when she did not like it, returned home several months later and lived on the top floor of the home with a friend.
■Mr. Roth made improper sexual advances to [Felicity]. This statement is utterly false.
■Mr. Roth suffered from a disease identified as “bipolar disorder.” This false and damaging statement appeared on page 178 of the galley proofs that you circulated to reviewers. . . .
If Bloom did not make a public retraction, Brooks concluded, Roth intended to recover damages against her “in an amount not less than $10 million.” (“He said, ‘How much do you want to sue her for, ten mill or twenty mill?’ ” Roth recalled. “And I said ‘Ten mill.’ Taking the high road.”)
In fact Bloom’s book never precisely described Roth as “misogynic,”¶ and then, too, “utterly false” is a stretch vis-à-vis whatever transpired between Roth and Felicity; but he fastened on Bloom’s explicit claim, in the galleys, that his struggle with “Halcion madness,” in 1987, “was the first manifestation of the symptoms that were later identified as bipolar disorder.” In 2008, Roth asked Bill Frosch, a psychiatrist he’d consulted for almost twenty years, to comment in writing on the validity of a bipolar diagnosis, and Frosch flatly denied that Roth had ever met DSM criteria for the illness: “I feel that I can say this with some confidence,” he wrote: “1. I know you well; and 2. I served on the American Psychiatric Association Task Force for DSM III, which still serves as the basis of the current diagnostic classification.” Two other psychiatrists, both familiar with Roth’s occasional bouts of unipolar depression, also denied he’d ever exhibited signs of mania. “It’s not an expression I would use, and I have no idea,” Bloom backpedaled during her November 11 interview (a few days after Brooks’s letter), when Lopate mentioned her reference to manic depression. He then asked about Roth’s Halcion madness. “That’s not being a manic-depressive,” said Bloom; “that’s being affected by dreadful drugs.”
In a 2013 email, Bloom claimed that she’d had “very good grounds” for her assertion of Roth’s supposed bipolar illness, “but it was agreed that these grounds were too feeble.” The very good (if too feeble) grounds were characterized as “a reliable source” in a rebuttal composed by Little, Brown’s general counsel, Carol Fein Ross, on November 12, 1996; nevertheless, Bloom had agreed to delete the reference. As for the rest of her allegedly defamatory statements, they were expressions of her “heartfelt” and “constitutionally protected opinions” and therefore not actionable, Ross concluded, on a deploring note:
[We] are disappointed that a writer of such exceptional talent and prominence would attempt to stifle someone else’s expression of opinion. . . .
It is regrettable that Mr. Roth is dismayed over the publication of Ms. Bloom’s book, as she had no intention of causing him harm. . . . Mr. Roth is a public figure who often writes about relationships, and, as such, there is public interest in information about relationships he has had. Because we have every confidence in Ms. Bloom’s work and do not believe it to be defamatory, we see no need for a public retraction.
As Roth remembered, “I had been virtually assured victory in the U.K.”—where libel laws are more stringent—“and Russell thought we had a pretty solid case in the U.S.” Roth had retained a firm of London solicitors, Harbottle & Lewis, and was briefly tempted to proceed, but first consulted friends whose judgment he trusted: Wylie, Miles, and Dr. Bloch. They all advised against it, and for the same reasons that doubtless would have dissuaded Roth in any case: “I did not want interminable conferences with lawyers and exhausting courtroom appearances and sleepless nights of arguing the case in my head to displace everything else in my life, beginning with my work, nor did I relish encountering the media coverage incited by a suit between the two of us.” Roth envisaged an ordeal akin to that of the ravaged litigants of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House: “Suffer any wrong that can be done you,” Dickens wrote of his chancery court, “rather than come here!” Besides, Roth liked to think Bloom’s book would go away soon enough, and meanwhile he could get on with his next two novels, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain (both about false accusation). “You know what Chekhov said when someone said to him ‘This too shall pass’?” Roth asked his biographer. “ ‘Nothing passes.’ Put that in the fucking book.”
