288 “blocks of consciousness”: CPR, 35.

  289 “coming out of [his] ears”: TS, “The Journey of Philip Roth,” Atlantic Monthly, Apr. 1969, 70.

  289 proposed to call “Cunt Crazy”: PR to William and Rose Styron, 2 Dec. 1967, PRPP.

  290 “one of the most important writers”: Tom Hedley to PR, 9 Apr. 1968, PR–LC.

  290 “for the first time”: PR to Alison Lurie, 25 June 1967, PRPP.

  291 “Since in my article I introduce”: Jeffrey Berman, “Revisiting Roth’s Psychoanalysts,” in The Critical Companion to Philip Roth, ed. Timothy Parrish (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 99.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  295 “for a price of at least”: MR’s plaintiff affidavit, 21 Feb. 1968, PRPP.

  296 “Paul’s letter, written in his usual”: MR to Edmund and Mary Keeley, 19 May 1966, Edmund Keeley Papers, PUL.

  297 “depression and acute anxiety”: MR’s affidavit of reply, 12 Mar. 1968, PRPP.

  298 “ ‘It’s so cold out here’ ”: Grace Glueck, “600 at Museum for Garden Fete,” New York Times, 9 May 1968.

  299 “to say something self-incriminating”: F, 424.

  299 “Got the good news early, huh?”: Ibid., 426.

  300 “dazed and shaken”: Ibid., 423.

  300 “Now we can run away together”: PR—memo.

  300 “a secondary, more personal irony”: F, 431.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  303 “stand Kafka on his head”: CPR, 34.

  303 “probably astronomical and worth”: Random House memo from Joe Fox to Bennett Cerf et al., 29 May 1968, Random House Records, CU–B.

  303 “the most brilliant piece of radical humor”: Quoted in CPR, 16.

  304 “I have my personal life”: BB int. Edward Hoagland, 30 Aug. 2014.

  305 “the length and breadth of the British Isles”: PR to Vernon Gibberd, 22 June 1968.

  305 “I could take you back to Pittsburgh”: F, 431. To protect Mudge’s anonymity in The Facts, Roth substituted Cleveland for Pittsburgh.

  305 “a delight, the food perfect”: PR to Herman and Nina Schneider, 28 July 1968, PR–LC.

  306 “in a pissy-smelling (cat piss)”: Ibid.

  306 “like an ad for the Mattachine Society”: Quoted in CPR, 22.

  306 “I’ve been a perfect crab”: PR to Schneiders, 28 July 1968.

  306 “[I] wondered what the hell”: F, 432.

  307 “Delighted to be back in this madhouse”: PR to Julian Mitchell, 13 Oct. 1968, Julian Mitchell Archive, BL.

  307 “You’re never coming back, lamb chop”: PR—memo.

  308 “In his writing, his humor”: Email from BCS to BB, 9 Dec. 2012.

  308 “A mature woman wouldn’t take your shit”: PR to Alan Lelchuk, n.d. [16 July 1969], Alan Lelchuk Papers, BU.

  309 “formal women’s club”: Alison Lurie to PR, 1 July 1969, PR–LC.

  309 “the biggest book in history”: Jason Epstein to PR, 3 July 1968, PR–LC.

  309 “Roth kicked the nice Jewish boy bit”: CPR, 15.

  310 “A savior and scapegoat of the ’60s”: Ibid., 23.

  311 Reviews of Portnoy’s Complaint: Time, 21 Feb. 1969; Brendan Gill, New Yorker, 8 Mar. 1969, 118–20; Alfred Kazin, New York Review of Books, 27 Feb. 1969; Josh Greenfeld, New York Times Book Review, 23 Feb. 1969, 1; Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times, 18 Feb. 1969; Granville Hicks and Marya Mannes, Saturday Review, 22 Feb. 1969, 39.

  312 “shameful, solitary addiction”: WW, 82.

  312 “the whole world of forbidden sexuality”: Isaac Rosenfeld, “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” Commentary, Oct. 1949.

  314 “Whom do you suffer for, Alex P.?”: Alfred Kazin, “The Earthly City of the Jews: Bellow, Malamud, and Roth,” in Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings, ed. TS (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 269.

  314 outnumbered “10 to 1”: Bennett Cerf to PR, 19 Mar. 1969, PR–LC.

  314 “In both views the Jewish male”: Marie Syrkin, “The Fun of Self-Abuse,” Midstream, Apr. 1969, 64–68.

  314 “This is the book for which all anti-Semites”: Gershom Scholem’s Haaretz review is quoted in Bernard Avishai, Promiscuous: “Portnoy’s Complaint” and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 111–12.

  315 “I said that history had obviously”: CPR, 246.

  315 “I haven’t read a novel in thirty years”: Jodi Kantor, “When Politics Catches Up with ‘Portnoy,’ ” New York Times, 3 Aug. 2013.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  316 “good boys and fine men”: Herman Roth to PR, 25 Apr. [1969], PR–LC.

  317 “My Philip,” she’d sigh: Herman Roth to PR, 22 Mar. 1969, PR–LC.

  317 “You walk down the street”: BB int. BCS, 8 Dec. 2012.

  317 “ Philip Roth! The enemy of the Jews!”: Philip Roth Unmasked, PBS American Masters, 2013; https://www.pbs.org/video/american-masters-watch-philip-roth-unmasked/.

  317 “I am so sorry,” said Roth: BB int. Alison Lurie, 24 May 2013.

  318 “the Jewish Mafia”: Conversations with Truman Capote, ed. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 158.

  319 “When Truman Capote later attacked”: Quoted in Saul Bellow, “A Jewish Writer in America” (typescript found in RGS Papers, UC).

  320 “I hope that it is now understood”: PR to Marc Jaffe, 6 May 1969, PRPP.

  321 “Barbra Streisand has no complaints”: WW, 79.

  321 “a sex maniac and a millionaire”: PR, “The Armies of Hypocrisy” (unpublished ms., c. Oct, 1972), PRPP.

  321 “a lusty young buck”: From Michael King’s biography of Frame, the pertinent galley pages of which were among some papers PR gave me.

  322 “blunt inquisitorial style”: PR, “Armies of Hypocrisy.”

  322 “Every day I had ten opportunities”: PR to TS, 21 Apr. 1969, TS Papers, NYPL–M&A.

  327 “What the hell did you do this for?”: PR—memo.

  327 “I’m happy,” she said: BB int. PR, 7 Dec. 2012.

  327 “I wish to hell I could live”: PR to Tom Maschler, 30 Apr. 1969, UR.

  328 “beats the pneumatic drill”: PR to Alan Lelchuk, 2 July [1969], Alan Lelchuk Papers, BU.

  328 “It was lovely and we both”: From a reminiscence dated 4 Feb. 2008, written by BCS at PR’s request, PRPP.

  328 “It’s Portnoy!”: BB int. BCS, 8 Dec. 2012.

  329 “American abstract art is a lie”: Charles McGrath, “Philip Guston and His Barbed-Pen Nixon Years,” New York Times, 30 Oct. 2016.

  329 “terrible loneliness”: From the transcript of an interview that Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, conducted with PR, 3 Mar. 1987, PRPP.

  330 “This bed is so big”: BB int. PR, 10 Dec. 2012.

  330 “I think [Roth] made it up,”: Julia Felsenthal, “In Scary Old Sex, Writer Arlene Heyman Confronts a Timeless Taboo,” vogue.com, 12 Mar. 2016; https://www.vogue.com/article/scary-old-sex-arlene-heyman-profile.

  331 “Some self-styled Lord Jim”: PR to Norman Mailer, 30 Mar. 1970, Norman Mailer Papers, Ransom.

  332 “After declining to take a bow”: “People,” Time, 30 Mar. 1970, 42.

  332 “At least they called me”: Norman Mailer to PR, 8 Apr. 1970, PR–LC.

  332 “ineffable, mysterious, strange”: PR to Julian Mitchell, 5 Mar. 1970, Julian Mitchell Archive, BL.

  332 “He sleepy”: BB int. PR, 25 May 2014.

  332 “like a large tear falling”: RMO, 185.

  332 “because it makes fun of the President”: PR to RSB, n.d. [c. Aug. 1970], RSB Papers, LC.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  334 “We weren’t idealistic”: James Walton, “Give Philip Roth the Nobel Prize as a Retirement Present,” Telegraph, 13 Nov. 2012.

  334 “saints of the imagination”: Josyane Savigneau, “Philip Roth: An Américain pas si tranquille,” Hors-Série Le Monde, Feb.–Mar. 2013.

  334 “the last pre-television generation”: PR’s acceptance remarks for the MacDowell Medal, 19 Aug. 2001, PRPP.

  335 “We’re hicks”: CPR, 160.

  335 “radiated wonderful family feeling”: JU to PR, 21 May [1981], PRPP.

  335 “to be all bad manners”: From the transcript of an interview that Musa Mayer conducted with PR, 3 Mar. 1987, PRPP.

  335 “know-it-all goy”: PR, “On the Air,” New American Review 10 (Aug. 1970), 8.

  336 “The comic imagination”: Geoffrey Wolff, “Beyond Portnoy,” Newsweek, 3 Aug. 1970, 67.

  336 “What do you think I ought”: Anatole Broyard, “Reading and Writing; Listener with a Voice,” New York Times, 22 Feb. 1981.

  337 “Reading the morning New York Times”: CPR, 87.

  337 “I can’t square [it] with my personal belief”: Ibid., 41.

  337 “Bad taste?!”: From a reminiscence dated 4 Feb. 2008, written by BCS at PR’s request, PRPP.

  337 “You always pull out Swift”: RU, 72.

  338 “a first-rate contingency plan”: CPR, 47.

  338 “more people are killed”: Ibid., 53.

  338 “lonesome and wanted some students”: PR to RSB, n.d. [c. Aug. 1970], RSB Papers, LC.

  338 “My education comes from”: Scott Raab, “Philip Roth Goes Home Again,” Esquire, Oct. 2010.

  338 “We students arrived early”: Lisa Scottoline, “English Class with Mr. Roth,” New York Times, 3 May 2014.

  338 “She was very observant”: Email from PR to JC, 4 May 2014.

  338 “habitual moralizing, ingenious interpretation”: Cynthia Haven, “The Novelist’s Obsession Is with Language,” 10 Jan. 2014; https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2014/02/an-interview-with-philip-roth-the-novelists-obsession-is-with-language/.

  339 “How can you open your mouth”: BB int. Fredrica Wagman, 15 Sept. 2013.

  340 “I felt at times you were going”: Marc Rovner to PR, 16 Jan. 1974, PR–LC.

  340 “a very clear and wholly scrutable”: PR to Marc Rovner, 25 Jan. 1974, PR–LC.

  341 “as it turned out, the role of”: Email from JC to BB, 20 Oct. 2013.

  341 “skated their Christmas trees”: JC’s introduction on the occasion of PR’s receiving the New Jersey Historical Society Award, 5 Oct. 1992, PRPP.

  342 “a card-carrying beast”: PR—memo.

  342 “It would appear from Playing House”: RMO, 210.

  343 “probably the best unpublished writer in America”: PR to Fredrica Wagman, 1 Apr. [1972].

  343 “Only Philip”: Fredrica Wagman to PR, n.d. [c. 1989], PR–LC.

  343 “Well! I just don’t know how”: BB int. Nela Wagman, 29 Jan. 2014.

  345 “I do not intend to read such garbage”: Mrs. Walter Thompson to PR (care of Random House), 8 Oct. 1971, Random House Records, CU–B.

  346 “ Our Gang is a political satire”: Dwight Macdonald, “Our Gang,” New York Times Book Review, 7 Nov. 1971.

  347 “an old fashioned villain in the Tartuffian mold”: CPR, 45.

  347 “would have been laughed out of Hollywood”: Quoted in Hermione Lee, Philip Roth (London: Methuen, 1982), 55.

  349 “Novelist Philip Roth may well be hoping”: “One Man’s Loss,” Newsweek, 24 June 1974, 15.

  349 “I wish publicly to apologize”: Our Gang, 664.

  350 “as indecent as the language”: Ibid., 665.

  350 “I was raised to be a Quaker, not a quitter”: RMO, 62.

  350 “Go to Hell!”: Robert Brustein, Making Scenes (New York: Random House, 1981), 174.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  351 “the ‘serious’ values of official literary culture”: CPR, 72.

  352 “hot as a firecracker”: PR to Tom Maschler, 4 Feb. 1972, UR.

  352 “walking prick”: RU, 77.

  352 “inspired by dwelling within the room’s contour”: PR@80, 13.

  353 “the best thing [he’d] ever done”: PR to Robert Brustein, 10 June [1972], Robert Brustein Archive, BU.

  354 “no later than October 15, 1972”: PR to Jason Epstein, 14 Apr. 1972, Random House Records, CU–B.

  354 “I want to put away any notion”: “The Letting Go of Random House by Philip Roth,” Book-of-the-Month Club Newsletter 1, no. 3 (1972).

  355 “distant enough to give a feeling”: Selected Letters of William Styron, ed. Rose Styron with R. Blakeslee Gilpin (New York: Random House, 2012), 206.

  356 “Malamud has already been at it”: BB int. BCS, 14 Sept. 2013.

  357 “Philip wouldn’t let go”: Alfred Kazin, diary entry, c. 30 Oct. 1987, Alfred Kazin Papers, NYPL–Berg.

  357 “it is only the prospect”: Selected Letters of William Styron, 634.

  358 “You just don’t want me to write fiction”: BB int. PR, 11 Oct. 2012.

  359 “somewhat stunned”: PR to “XX (President of the Czech Writers’ Union),” n.d. [c. June 1975], PRPP.

  360 “All those people are swine”: BB int. PR, 12 July 2012.

  360 “amid gales of laughter”: PR’s acceptance remarks for the PEN Literary Service Award, 30 Apr. 2013, PRPP.

  360 “he licked her pan”: BB int. BCS, 21 Mar. 2013.

  360 “undermined the identity of the nation”: Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books, 26 Apr. 1984, 37.

  361 Reviews of The Breast: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times, 12 Sept. 1972; John Gardner, New York Times Book Review, 17 Sept. 1972; TS, Esquire, Oct. 1972, 178; Peter Prescott, Newsweek, 25 Sept. 1972.

  363 “In The Breast, my approach to the outlandish”: CPR, 56.

  364 “I have a feeling”: PR to TS, n.d. [Aug. 1972], TS Papers, NYPL–M&A.

  364 “to read Kafka as though”: PR to Rust Hills, n.d. [c. Nov. 1973], PR–LC.

  365 “What have I in common with the Jews?”: Quoted in WW, 11.

  365 “I’ll tell you the truth”: CPR, 207.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  366 “mean, pricky streak”: RMO, 196.

  366 “since he was a writer whose animating principle”: My account of PR’s clash with Mailer derives mostly from PR’s unpublished typescript “The Armies of Hypocrisy,” PRPP, which, internal evidence suggests, was written within weeks or even days of the episode in question. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are taken from this source.

  368 “in that it attributes a character”: Eric Pace, “Mailer Finds Book Is No Advertisement for Himself,” New York Times, 18 Oct. 1972.

  369 “nothing less than furious”: Alan Lelchuk to Wilfrid Sheed, 9 June 1973, PR–LC.

  369 “fanaticism in the hatred of things Jewish”: Quoted in WW, 101.

  369 “Whatever the final merits”: “Portnoy Defended” (letter to the editor), Commentary, July 1969.

  370 “was at his core a dutiful immigrant son”: Sam Tanenhaus, “A Midcentury Agitator, Boxing Left and Right,” New York Times Book Review, 9 Nov. 2014.

  370 “young Jewish intellectual”: Mark Shechner, Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 47.

  371 “a mugging, pure and simple”: Ibid., 9.

  371 “prissy” young man’s disgust”: Norman Podhoretz, “The Adventures of Philip Roth,” Commentary, Oct. 1998.

  371 “He has largely lost his sense”: Irving Howe, “The Lost Young Intellectual,” in Mid-Century: An Anthology of Jewish Life and Culture in Our Times, ed. Harold U. Ribalow (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1955), 152.

  372 “give an inch of encouragement”: Irving Howe, “The Suburbs of Babylon,” New Republic, 15 June 1959, 17.

  373 “straight out of the Goebbels-Streicher script”: Marie Syrkin, letter to the editor, Commentary, Mar. 1973.

  376 “We can be sure that in some Roth story”: Mark Shechner, “Roth Against the Jews,” 7 Nov. 1973; this thirty-seven-page typescript, which was eventually revised for publication in Partisan Review, was included among papers PR passed along to me.

  376 “You sententious bastard”: AL, 369.

  376 “Much boom lowering”: PR to James Atlas, 2 May 1983, James Atlas Papers, NYPL–Berg.

  377 “I wasn’t trying to alienate”: RU, 78.

  377 Reviews of The Great American Novel: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times, 14 May 1973; William H. Gass, New York Review of Books, 31 May 1973.

  378 “Please advise Professor Gass”: PR, letter to the editor, New York Review of Books, 19 July 1973.

  378 “a means to dramatize the struggle”: CPR, 74.

  379 “Enough to make Flaubert spin”: Ibid., 99.

  379 “alone in this world”: PR to Andrew Wylie, n.d. [c. May 1992], PRPP.

  380 “the trivializing idiocies”: PR, “Bruno Schulz,” undated typescript, PRPP.

  380 “looked like an intellectual Ringo Starr”: BB int. BCS, 21 Mar. 2013.

  381 “Why don’t you leave?”: BB int. PR, 12 July 2012.

  382 “I learned the value of humor”: WW, 258.

  382 “Optimism is the opium”: Milan Kundera, The Joke, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin, 1982), 26.

  383 “Or else,” said Roth, “She was waiting for an offer”: RU, 96.

  386 “What a book”: PR to A. Alvarez, 27 July [1976], Alvarez Papers, BL.

  386 “the only writer in America other than myself”: PR to Peter Godwin, 16 Feb. 2013, PRPP.

  386 “Tell, then, how you bought places”: Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Vedder (New York: Penguin, 1976), 22.

  386 “He shot my Jew, so I shot his”: PO, 487.

  387 “Joanna,” he said, “you’re drunk”: HM int. Joanna Clark, 30 June 2007.

  388 “But maybe that wasn’t so bad”: Michael Henry Heim, The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim and a Life in Translation, ed. Esther Allen and Sean Cotter (Rochester, N.Y.: Open Letter, 2014), 88.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  389 “novel about trying to write that novel”: PR to CB, 4 Dec. 1975, CB/Theatre and Film Archive, BU.

  390 Reviews of My Life as a Man: Anatole Broyard, New York Times, 23 May 1974; Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review, 2 June 1974, 1.