Philip roth, p.95
Philip Roth, page 95
On May 17—the day after the Times’s jeering item about the déjà vu aspect of his Yaddo appearance (The Wall Street Journal also chimed in)—Robert McCrum wrote in The Observer that in a few days the BBC would air the “latest episode in Roth’s long goodbye”: a two-part interview in which he admitted to Alan Yentob, “Now that I don’t write, I just want to chatter away.” This time, however, Roth was prepared to “guarantee” that the BBC program was his “absolutely last appearance on any stage anywhere.” “Every day I scan the headlines for a new one,” Lisa Halliday wrote him. “ ‘ “No More Haircuts” Says Roth.’ Or: ‘Philip Roth Has Eaten His Last Everything Bagel.’ Or: ‘Roth: “The Struggle With Making the Bed is Over.” ’ ” Roth didn’t mind such teasing from the well-meaning Halliday, but (“at the risk of being mistaken for just another paranoid artist like Vincent Van Gogh and Ezra Pound”) he suggested that the media’s gleefulness was a matter of Kierkegaardian leveling:
[T]he dim afterglow of the barrage of indictment that began, in my case, with the New Yorker publication of “Defender of [the] Faith” and has never stopped, however silly the leveling (as in this case) or however savage (as with the indictments of the anti-Semite, the self-hating Jew, the pornographer, the misogynist, the Anna [Steiger] abuser and C[laire] B[loom]’s Machiavellian). . . . Why this media eagerness to find culpability in matters large and small? Is it PR who stabbed his beautiful young wife in the chest and who, with horrific results, later sponsored the freedom of a homicidal madman [Jack Henry Abbott]? Norman Mailer could only dream of such disapproval as I continue to arouse without lifting a finger. . . .
AND THEN THERE WERE the movies they made out of his books. “Roth takes pride in the proposed filming and production of his work,” Ira Nadel claimed in “Philip Roth and Film,” “noting that film dramatically exposes his work to larger audiences.” “Pure rubbish, from the first sentence to the last,” Roth scribbled at the end of Nadel’s paper with his red Flair pen. On the contrary—as he once remarked to Hanif Kureishi, a screenwriter (My Beautiful Laundrette) who also wrote fiction—Roth found verbal precision more lasting than the pictorial kind, and was forever annoyed when a TV or radio spot about him and his work opened with, say, a clip from Goodbye, Columbus (the movie), as if the one had anything to do with the other.
Still, an author could hope that just maybe, someday, a movie would do faint justice to its source. In the case of The Dying Animal, however, Roth was skeptical from the get-go, given that it was being adapted by the same team—screenwriter Nicholas Meyer and producer Tom Rosenberg of Lakeshore Entertainment—who had “ruined” The Human Stain. And yet Roth was more proactive than ever, reading the whole novel aloud to Isabel Coixet, the Spanish director, who listened bemusedly (she told The New York Times) as he “faithfully reproduced ‘all the noises the characters did,’ even in the sex scenes, which he urged her to depict.” Penélope Cruz was cast as Consuela, and when she phoned Roth for advice about the part, he suggested they have dinner together: “You can sit in Nicole’s [Kidman] seat here in my apartment,” he remembered telling her. “You can sit on the ottoman of the Eames chair.” But he never heard from her again. As for the movie—renamed Elegy to avoid the stigma of “Dying” in the title—it was the expected disappointment and then some: “It’s all wrong, this Englishman,” Roth complained about the casting of Ben Kingsley; Kepesh, he said, is “an American talking about American college life in the sixties; he’s not an Englishman!” Reminded that Kingsley/Kepesh, in the movie, briefly discusses the sixties on the Charlie Rose Show, Roth went red in the face: “Oh yeah, it gives him something to talk about on TV! No! He lives it, schmucko!”
“Whatever its limitations,” Roth noted, in 2010, of Goodbye, Columbus, “it’s still by far the best movie that’s ever been made of my books”—this despite the casting of the “nebbishy” Richard Benjamin as Neil, another alter ego Roth thought should be played with “aggression” and “power.” When Benjamin was cast again in Portnoy, Roth refused to see the (ghastly) movie when it was released in 1972, and Warner Brothers did nothing to dissuade him; that same year, however (and almost every year thereafter), Roth watched The Godfather and wistfully reflected that the young Al Pacino would have made a perfect Portnoy. He was guardedly pleased, then, when he met Pacino at a party in late 2009, and learned that the great (and forceful) actor had bought the rights to The Humbling. As Pacino described their encounter, “I remember saying to him that I was so excited by this book. . . . I said I found it so funny—and that wasn’t such a wise thing to say.” “Don’t make the dildo into a joke,” Roth sternly wrote him afterward: Kurosawa, he said, would make it into a dagger; Bergman would make it into a cross. “Rescue it from the easy Seinfeld jokes and allow it the erotic force of a weapon or of a religious object being blasphemously exploited.” “You’ve written a beautiful dark piece and I probably misspoke when I said the word comedy,” Pacino replied.
Roth’s hopes mounted when he learned that Greta Gerwig—whom he’d found “enchanting” in Frances Ha (she reminded him of Brigit)—had been cast as the capricious Pegeen, and no less than Oscar winner Barry Levinson (Rain Man) was hired to direct. Pacino’s reassurances to Roth were belied, however, by the “zany ferocity” (The New York Times) he brought to the role of Axler, and meanwhile the dildos (plural) were decidedly played for laughs. “The Double Dog and the fisting mitt,” says a fastidious housekeeper in the movie, “they’re going in the washing.” “No thoughts,” said Roth, when asked for his thoughts.
After that, he seemed to cultivate a stoical detachment toward the movies. He no longer took an interest in the lead actresses and, when asked, refused to look at screenplays or offer other kinds of advice. He found the 2016 adaptation of Indignation, directed by James Schamus, to be every bit as respectable as Goodbye, Columbus: “It’s quite watchable and at times, when they stick closely to the book, it’s strong.” One detected a slight, gentle waggery in his brief response to Tom Rosenberg—yes, of Lakeshore Entertainment—after watching the man’s latest Roth production, American Pastoral: “Tom, I saw and enjoyed the movie. You’re going to win all the prizes.” The movie won no prizes, and Roth was privately appalled by the filmmakers’ loss of nerve in the crucial early scene between the child Merry and Swede, who does not oblige his daughter with a kiss, and also by the movie’s “false and meaningless” ending, wherein the daughter comes out of hiding to attend the Swede’s funeral. But Roth’s expectations were salubriously lowered by then, and he conceded that the main characters, at least, were nicely portrayed by Ewan McGregor (who also directed), Jennifer Connelly, and Dakota Fanning: “I did enjoy it for what it was,” he said, “even if it’s a sliver off the comet of the book.”
WHEN CYNTHIA OZICK FIRST got word of Roth’s retirement, she (and many others) refused to believe it: “A writer who stops writing while still breathing has already declared herself posthumous.” For Roth, of course, that was kind of the idea, and once the hubbub finally died down, it became something of a reality. Having knocked himself out for fifty-plus years, he found his life nowadays to be “full of quiet pleasure,” divided between his “light-filled apartment” with its south-facing view of the Manhattan skyline, and “the splendor of my wooded, hilly corner of rural northwestern Connecticut.”
Every day was pretty much the same. At ten o’clock he took a taxi to the St. Bart’s pool, where he’d go through his aqua-jogging routine. His trainer, Luye Lui, adored him and vice versa: she called him Nails because he showed up even when “he could barely drag his walker,” and he called her Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side (where she was born) after the Fugs song. Roth was home again for lunch, after which he’d strip down to his underwear and nap for an hour or so (“Take your clothes off and sleep in your underwear,” his father had advised him; “you’ll go to sleep much faster and have a deeper sleep”), then he’d resume poring over old files and writing little commentaries for his biographer—a task that kept him occupied until the end of 2013. Next he began examining hundreds of personal photographs with a magnifying glass and carefully labeling one after another—“an amazing trek backwards through all the many years of my life,” he said, delighted to be looking one more time “at the faces of people who meant the world to me and were the world to me.” He labeled his last photograph on January 26, 2014.
When Roth stopped writing, he pretty much stopped reading, too—and not just fiction, as he told the press. “Three things I don’t do anymore,” he liked to say: “fucking, writing, and reading.” On November 21, 2010, he noncensoriously noted in his diary that he hadn’t so much as looked inside a book for at least a month, and two years later he cheerfully admitted to Charles McGrath of the Times that his only reading these days was iPhone for Dummies. Eventually, though, he had to get back to it, because he went on living and the days only got longer: “I can’t say I retain things as I once did,” he wrote Ann Sides Bishop, “but while I’m at it it provides deep pleasure.” One book led to another: while reading FDR and the Jews, he came across the name of Roosevelt’s scandal-ruined strategist Sumner Welles (“great man, should have been president”), which led him to a biography of Welles by his son Benjamin, whence Roth learned that Welles had been named after a distant relative, Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator who was caned by a South Carolina congressman, and this in turn sparked an interest in the Civil War and its antecedents, and so to Brenda Wineapple’s Ecstatic Nation and his friend Sean Wilentz’s “brimming, masterful” The Rise of American Democracy. To Wilentz he imparted a thought that, in his previous life, might have germinated into a novel: What if the Germans had lived with two centuries of Nazism the way the American South had lived with slavery? Surely the “beastliness” would continue to “blight their politics, and infiltrate their dreams” à la the “inexpungable” heartlessness of certain social attitudes in the South unto the present day.
One reason Roth, as a novelist, had kept such long writing hours was that he’d always been averse to serious reading in the daytime, which left him little alternative but to keep working; the retired Roth also preferred to do most of his reading while tucked into bed at night, but instead of writing during the day (as his next-door neighbor, and renter, would attest after his death) he watched lots of TV. Often this served an edifying purpose, as his reading would alert him to this or that speech by Roosevelt, Hitler, Mussolini, et al. that he watched via YouTube. But mostly he liked old baseball games: “This game broke my Dodger heart in 1952,” he emailed Conarroe, including the YouTube link. “Watch Robinson bunt, watch Mantle swing. I’ve never recovered.”† Roth also discovered that he himself had a considerable YouTube presence and would often send his more flattering clips to friends. Mia Farrow, for one, was “mystified and amused,” noting that their mutual friend Styron would never have done that (albeit implying, too, a kind of endearing ingenuousness on Roth’s part, versus simple egotism).
Roth’s summer months in Connecticut were almost ideally monotonous. Sometimes he simply sat in his Eames chair listening to the rain (“Better to hear that than all the gossip”) or watching, say, a “wild turkey perched on the stone wall outside of my studio honking like mad for her missing puffballs,” which, he suspected, had been devoured by his “resident fox.” Roth’s mail was delivered to his house in the late afternoon if he failed to visit the post office beforehand, but nowadays he was loath to forgo the morning ritual of picking up his mail, buying a newspaper at the Cornwall Bridge general store, and proceeding on sunny days to a picnic table beside the Housatonic. It was nice, too, after forty-plus years, that his neighbors had mostly gotten used to his status as “the Jew porn writer”; the general store was now run by Ed Baird’s son, Tom, who invariably greeted Roth with “How ya Mets doin’?”—even though Roth hadn’t been a Mets fan since the late eighties or so—and this too was a cherished part of the ritual.
Except for his cook, Catherine von Klitzing, and a few visiting old friends, Roth saw almost nobody but incidental acquaintances. Most of his local friends were either dead (Styron, Huvelle, Kazin, Arthur Miller and his wife, Inge Morath) or permanently estranged (Ross Miller and the Grays). Roth was visiting his dying brother in Chicago on April 15, 2009, when he was slated to receive (along with the actor Campbell Scott and the chef Jacques Pépin) a Governor’s Award for Excellence in Culture and Tourism, so he sent a proxy, Charlie Kafferman, co-owner of the West Street Grill, who always made a point of stopping at Roth’s table to tell a few zingers and keep him company as needed.
Happily, around the time of his retirement, Roth revived his friendship with Mia Farrow, who took to joining him for dinner on Sunday evenings. One night she “caused a mini-uproar”—so the Huffington Post reported—by tweeting a photo of her and Roth with the caption “We’re watching #sharknado”: “Sites like Vulture and Gawker rightly jumped on the tweet almost immediately, if only because it was lolarious [sic] to imagine Roth watching a movie where Tara Reid and Ian Ziering fight tornado sharks.” Privately Farrow admitted that they hadn’t, in fact, been watching Sharknado, though she did try to persuade Roth that Twitter was fun and even worthwhile (“Margaret Atwood’s on there”), but Roth wasn’t having any. “So everybody’s just shouting, right?” he said, indignant at the very thought of it.
Over the years Roth had been a sweetly attentive friend to Farrow. In 1999, when her eleven-year-old son, Seamus (later called Ronan), was bored in school, it was Roth who phoned his friend Bernie Rodgers, the dean of Simon’s Rock, and persuaded him to make an “absolutely unprecedented” exception for the boy to attend college-level classes with students who were otherwise old enough for high school. Seamus flourished in Great Barrington but still wanted more of a challenge, so Roth devised a reading course for him, The American Novel and American History—various novels with supplemental nonfiction, such as The Naked and the Dead plus the LOA’s Reporting World War II (two volumes) and All the King’s Men plus T. Harry Williams’s biography of Huey Long. “That should fill your spare hours for a while,” Roth wrote the boy. “Good luck.”
“He’s probably the best listener in my life,” Mia Farrow said of Roth, who once asked her why she kept looking out the window during their conversation. Far from seeming incredulous or dismissive when she frankly admitted a fear that Woody Allen would have her killed, Roth became an unfailing source of moral support—because he was fond of Farrow and had unwavering faith in her probity, and also because of his conviction, always firm, that Allen was a bad artist and a bad human being. “He seized upon the persona of the schlemiel as, in all senses, a profitable disguise,” he said of Allen. “But inside this schlemiel there lives a crocodile.”‡
Farrow hardly viewed Roth as a misogynist, though she did admit his attitude toward women could be on the quaintly paternalistic side: “It comes out of the best part of the man: ‘I want to help this person; I want to see them do their very best.’ But it’s according to his book.” Roth’s advice was always well meaning, and often welcome, except when it came in the form of unsolicited, Herman-like hocking about one’s clothes, hair, or the like. Farrow hastened to point out that Roth had formidable women friends—Thurman, Pierpont, Lee, others—who were likely to be exempt from that sort of thing: “But unless you’re in the elite that he can really look up to . . . I think the rest of womenkind falls into a different pool.” Having been married to a domineering Italian who used to order her, say, to put on a sweater (“The other sleeve too! Button it up!”), Farrow was used to the phenomenon to put it mildly. “One more thing,” Roth wrote her, after a 2013 Vanity Fair article revisited the Woody Allen scandal and threatened to disrupt her life again. “If anyone, friends not excluded, calls to talk to you about VF, don’t let them. Interrupt and say, ‘Sorry, can’t talk—GRANDCHILDREN!’ And immediately HANG UP THE PHONE WHOEVER IT MAY BE. Promise me that you will do this.”
AS THEY GOT OLDER, Roth wearied a little of Joel Conarroe, who, he said, “cannot be natural with me,” though he knew Conarroe to be a witty man in less daunting company; also he was put off by Conarroe’s increasing deafness. Thus the friendship was mostly conducted, in later years, via email, often during baseball games: “In order to win, you have to be able to hit,” Roth emailed Conarroe on October 6, 2015, while watching the Yankees get eliminated from the play-offs. “Oh your prophetic soul!” his friend replied. “My grandmother could have done better than that.”
Conarroe was aware of his own loss of status, at least relative to their friend Ben Taylor, who (said Conarroe) “seems to have assumed the role of favorite Bro.” Roth and Taylor had first met at Conarroe’s sixtieth birthday party in 1994, and, during the last decade or so of Roth’s life, the younger man was without question Roth’s most intimate male friend. The two met for dinner almost weekly. Roth delighted in finding Taylor always reading a book (“the only such person in the restaurant”), which he’d then discuss with humor and erudition, along with whatever else he was reading and teaching. “He is discrete [sic] and decorous almost to a fault,” Roth noted, though of course discretion was no fault in Roth’s eyes. “The only such person between the Battery and the Cloisters.” When Janis Bellow mentioned she was looking for someone to edit a book of her late husband’s letters, Roth promptly proposed Taylor; over breakfast at the Lotos Club, Taylor astutely held forth about Bellow’s life and work for the benefit of Janis and their lawyer friend, Walter Pozen, while Roth sat beaming—proud of Taylor, he said, “like a father for a son,” all the more when he read the final product three years later, and saw that Taylor had discharged his duties “brilliantly and meticulously.”
