Early that spring Maggie discovered she was pregnant, professing amazement given her diligent use of a diaphragm. The anxious couple consulted a friendly GP, who suggested they try a drug that might induce heavy bleeding and lead to a legal D&C in the hospital. To their great relief it worked, and, while Maggie was recovering, Roth visited her room with flowers and Champagne. He found her chatting with a middle-aged man who proved to be the hospital rabbi. After the chaplain had excused himself, Maggie responded to Roth’s bewildered question with the information that she’d registered at the hospital as a Jew. “I had my first sense that she was crazy,” Roth remembered, “but it was fleeting.” Rather than pursue the matter then and there, Roth let it go with a chuckle. “What the hell you do that for?” he asked. “I wouldn’t let one of those guys near me.”

  * A pseudonym; I’ve also changed the names of Maggie’s first husband and their daughter.

  † Including the young Saul Bellow, whose family used to vacation at a local kosher resort, Yashenovsky’s.

  ‡ Interesting given the moniker’s later fame in Portnoy, which actually had its beginnings as yet another attempt to fictionalize the Maggie disaster; Roth would insist, however, and somewhat persuasively, that the ultimate form the Monkey took in his novel bore little or no resemblance to Maggie.

  CHAPTER

  Ten

  TOM ROGERS INTRODUCED ROTH TO HIS FRIEND DICK Stern, a fellow Iowa Workshop graduate who taught creative writing at Chicago. Stern was five years older than Roth and married (unhappily) with two children; he’d published a few stories in little magazines and was working on his first novel. That spring of 1957, Dean Wilt gave Stern two thousand dollars to invite four writers to campus at five hundred apiece—a distinguished roster that comprised Bellow, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, and Ralph Ellison. Bellow came on May 1 and agreed to preside over two classes: one for discussing his own work, the other for discussing a student’s.

  Bellow’s visit was especially momentous. In recent years his reputation had been bolstered by the first of three National Book Awards, for Augie March, and the subsequent publication of his acclaimed novella Seize the Day. Casting about for a manuscript worthy of their guest, Stern asked to mimeograph “The Conversion of the Jews,” though Roth wasn’t one of his students, and—Stern’s admiration notwithstanding—the story had been briskly refused by The New Yorker and various quarterlies. While the anonymous author sat in back of the class, discreetly silent, the twenty or so students discussed the story a little severely until Bellow took his turn—a cherished moment preserved in The Ghost Writer, where Bellow appears in the thin disguise of Felix Abravanel, who defends Nathan Zuckerman’s story (“largely with his laugh”) against the “orthodox Forsterites” who think its characters lack the “round” quality prescribed by Aspects of the Novel. After class Roth was thrilled when he was invited to join Bellow and Stern for coffee at the Reynolds Club—though he sensed Bellow’s breezy charm was a species of aloofness, and in fact Bellow “left [Roth] where he found [him]” rather than help place his admirable story. Still, Roth had made a definite impression on the great man, who would remember “Conversion” as “the real thing”: “When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around,” he wrote Roth twelve years later, “and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.”

  Because of his appearance in the Foley anthology, Roth had returned to campus as a minor celebrity, and editors at the Chicago Review were eager to publish more of his work. That spring Roth gave them a little satire, “Positive Thinking on Pennsylvania Avenue,” making fun of a folksy bedtime prayer the president liked to say, according to the positive-thinking guru Norman Vincent Peale. As Roth wrote, “ ‘Lord,’ the President’s prayer begins, ‘I want to thank You for helping me today. You really stuck by me. . . .’ The Lord is not so much his shepherd, Mr. Eisenhower indicates, as his helper, his aide-de-camp.” The author goes on like that, swinging a heavy rubber mallet at some pretty broad targets; the intelligentsia’s rabid distaste for Ike seems a bit much these days, given certain of his successors, but the editor of The New Republic, Gilbert Harrison, was happy to reprint the piece for his June 3, 1957, issue, and the author was reviled in a subsequent letters column. “[T]he most distasteful article I have ever read in The New Republic,” one reader wrote. “[A] fatuous piece of boorishness,” said another, “and in wretched taste.”

  By then Harrison had already asked the young wag if he’d like a gig reviewing TV shows for the magazine; Roth replied that he’d prefer to review movies, even though he rarely went to the movies and, by his own admission, had “never read a movie review in [his] life.” Later he’d dismiss his work in the genre as “unreadable, rich with snide condescension and little more,” but at the time he was simply delighted by the chance to ridicule popular culture for a wide audience and make easy money doing it (twenty-five bucks a review). Because of Roth’s determination to enjoy himself—versus any serious attempt to grapple with aesthetics, since he viewed almost all movies as ipso facto crap—certain of his pieces have worn well regardless of their nominal subjects. “Miss [Audrey] Hepburn brings to the role her usual elfishness,” he wrote of Love in the Afternoon; “she is certainly a handsome young woman, but there continues to be something a bit wearing about an elf that knows it’s an elf.” Perhaps inspired by his shtick with the ineffable Geffen, Roth wrote his “review” of The Sun Also Rises (starring an ill, sallow-faced Tyrone Power as the impotent Jake Barnes) in the form of a Hemingway dialogue between the critic and a poule he meets outside the movie theater:

  “But Jake has this wound—” the poule began.

  “That’s tough all right,” I said, “but not seedy.”

  She took it for a pun. “You are a hard man.”

  “What the hell,” I said, “what the hell.”

  As it happened, Roth also wrote the odd piece about TV; indeed, his favorite contribution to The New Republic was a definitive take on the Miss America pageant as it then existed, “Coronation on Channel Two,” in which he described lovely young contestants having to “extricate” themselves “from the gleeful ooze secreted by the master of ceremonies, Bert Parks.”

  After a few months, though, the weekly chore began to pall, and besides Roth was sick of the magazine’s “butchers” who chopped his prose to “smithereens.” The sinecure had provided enough money to buy a ten-year-old Plymouth from his cousin Kenny in Newark, and meanwhile Roth was replaced at The New Republic by Stanley Kauffmann, a less funny but more responsible critic who would hold the post for forty-five years, until his death in 2013.

  AFTER THAT FIRST pregnancy scare, Roth entertained thoughts of keeping his distance from Maggie; by then, however, their friends perceived them as a couple and tended to invite them over as such. Also Maggie was eager to prove her usefulness, as when Roth had “a bad siege with [his] back” in May, and “Maggie cared for [him], kindly, sweetly,” as he wrote the Maurers. She was willing to be of use in less conventional ways, too. Roth admired the charms of a certain graduate assistant for the Committee on Social Thought, Diane, who made a point of attending weekly Social Sciences teas—arranged by the secretary, Maggie—because she was poor and hungry and the food was free. At some point Maggie became “inordinately interested” in her, as Diane recalled, suggesting a threesome with her boyfriend, Philip Roth, a campus wunderkind the woman was eager to meet. In retrospect Diane had “no doubt” Maggie was the instigator, and Roth also said that Maggie was the one who “pushed for it” (“ ‘Let’s fuck Diane’ ”). For her part Maggie noted a “Story idea” about two lovers who are both “imaginative” and “intelligent”: “He one day suggests it would be exciting to introduce a 3rd person. She is shocked by the idea.”

  As Roth remembered the logistics of the occasion (chez Maggie), Diane and Maggie went into the bedroom first, followed by Diane and Roth, and finally the three went in together. Since Diane was essentially a lesbian, Roth “felt terribly left out” (“If I start crying, you’ll have to understand”); waiting for the two women to emerge, he said, was like “waiting for a haircut.” In fact, it was hardly a red-letter evening for either Roth or their guest; afterward the two met for coffee and agreed the whole thing had been peculiarly uncomfortable, perhaps because Maggie seemed so keen on controlling things. Diane made a point of avoiding the Social Sciences secretary thereafter, but was left with “the distinct impression that Maggie was determined to marry Philip Roth. . . . She wasn’t good-looking, she didn’t strike one as intellectually ambitious, but she certainly was one of the most determined people I ever met.”

  Roth had hoped to spend the summer of 1957 working on his fiction at the Yaddo or MacDowell art colonies, but both turned him down. Instead he drove to Falmouth, Cape Cod, at the end of June, agreeing to pick up Maggie in Boston a week or so later, when her own vacation was due. Alone with his thoughts, Roth had dire misgivings. Since the pregnancy, especially, his arguments with Maggie had become fierce, and he was unsettled by the novelty of her rage; it occurred to him that the only time he’d ever “seen anybody in the flesh enraged” was during that terrible argument with his father six years before. (“How the hell do I know where you are! You could be in a whorehouse!”) Now it was an almost daily occurrence. A weeklong tryst on Cape Cod with “a quiet, easygoing, plainish girl”—an education major at Boston University who was waiting tables at a local restaurant—made the prospect of Maggie’s turbulence all the more disheartening. Sure enough, she arrived in Boston with her guns loaded, furious that Roth hadn’t stayed with her in Chicago that summer. For three days they wrangled about this and related matters, until Roth threw in the sponge: he would drive her to New York, he proposed, while he caught up with his parents in Moorestown. In the car Maggie weepily harangued him: she had only two weeks of vacation a year, and he’d ruined it! The least he could do was take her along to meet his parents, the way he’d taken Maxine and Betty, or wasn’t she good enough . . .? “When she wouldn’t stop I wanted to kill her,” said Roth. “Instead I took her home with me.”

  The visit went poorly, and not because Maggie wasn’t Jewish. His parents had gotten along fine with Betty Powell, after all, and were even a little disappointed when Philip hadn’t married her. (Of course, being a shiksa was hardly an asset. Joan Roth, a cousin, remembered how Bess and Herman had routinely warned her away from the goyim: “ ‘You’re a Jew, of course you date a Jew. You marry a Jew! . . . You can’t trust a goy. He’ll love you and leave you!’ The irony,” said Joan, “was that I did marry a gentile and the first words he learned was shiker shagitz”—drunk gentile.) As for Maggie, she was a perfect package of folly, the gist of which Roth conveyed in The Facts: “No, what they saw to frighten them wasn’t the shiksa but a hard-up loser four years my senior, a penniless secretary and divorced mother of two small children, who, as she was quick to explain at dinner the first night, had been ‘stolen’ from her by her ex-husband.” Somehow Bess made it through breakfast the next morning, and when she asked Philip and the woman whether they had any laundry from their trip, Maggie gladly surrendered her dirty underwear. “I cannot do this woman’s laundry,” Bess told her son in the kitchen an hour later (in The Facts, Roth has her walking three miles to Maple Shade, weeping, to complain to Herman of this final indignity). “She will have to go.” In the car Maggie asked to say goodbye to Philip’s father, in whose office she complained bitterly about how rudely she’d been treated. Herman listened with an air of managerial sympathy, careful however to call the woman Mrs. Miller. Finally Philip drove her on to New York, where she presently caught a plane back to Chicago, whither he himself was due to return a month later.

  FOR VARIOUS REASONS Roth had hoped for a change of venue once he got started on his Ph.D. From Harvard he anticipated a fellowship worth at least $1,500, and at the last moment he also applied to Columbia “just in case Harvard falls through. . . . Trilling and Barzun and Eric Bentley sound more exciting than a return to Walter Blair and Company.” Both programs accepted Roth but without stipends, whereas Chicago offered $1,000 and Dean Wilt sweetened the deal with another $1,500 if Roth would agree to teach a section of composition. Thus Roth found himself back in Chicago, again as a graduate student, that fall. Along with Wilt’s class on Henry James (“Just now I put down Portrait of A Lady, and wonder what my writing efforts will ever amount to next to that”), he took Contemporary Criticism and Anglo-Saxon, the last of which he particularly loathed.

  Somehow Roth managed to evolve as a fiction writer while keeping up with the demands of a doctoral program and grinding out weekly pieces for The New Republic.* Another milestone was tagged that fall, when he sold “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings”—his story about Albie and Duke, the tough Italian kids in his freshman homeroom at Weequahic—to Commentary, which he’d been reading devotedly since he first discovered it in the periodical room at Bucknell. Though the magazine would someday launch a number of scathing attacks on his work and person, at the time Roth found it a liberating guide for intellectual American Jews of his generation, who “wanted to leave [their] narrow backgrounds, but maintain [them]selves as Jewish men.” In Commentary he encountered the work of not only Bellow and Malamud, but other favorites such as Isaac Rosenfeld’s ribald analysis of the kosher laws, “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” and Wallace Markfield’s sardonic look at Jewish family life in Brooklyn, “The Country of the Crazy Horse.” (“The novelist, what’s his name, Markfield,” muses Portnoy, “has written in a story somewhere that until he was fourteen he believed ‘aggravation’ to be a Jewish word.”) “I thought, ‘Boy I’m in it, it’s great,’ ” Roth remembered, thinking of the first time he visited the New York offices of Commentary and met its then editor, Martin Greenberg (brother of the art critic Clement), who quickly became a friend: “He’d read everything, but he talked like a guy from the neighborhood.” It’s noteworthy, however, that the actual person who plucked Roth’s first story out of the slush pile was a recently hired assistant editor, Norman Podhoretz, who would become one of Roth’s most bitter enemies once he took over as editor in chief, in 1960, and eventually led the magazine in a gallingly different direction.

  Back in January 1957, Roth had finished the first draft of a sixty-two-page novella, Expect the Vandals, inspired by a news story about Japanese soldiers in the Philippines who didn’t know the emperor had surrendered and so remained hidden away on one of the islands. “You’ll be especially happy to know that there is not a Jew or a child (or an adolescent for that matter) in the entire thing,” Roth wrote the Maurers, pleased that he’d managed to “barrel through” such an extended piece of work, though he realized it would need “a radical rewriting” (involving, among other things, his turning one of the main characters into at least a nominal Jew, Moe Malamud). Five months later, Roth sent a revised version to Ballantine for consideration as part of their New Short Novels series, and by the time they returned it, in September, Roth had received an intriguing invitation from the new assistant fiction editor at Esquire, Gene Lichtenstein, who recalled:

  Philip sent in a satire of ornithologists and it was terrible, really terrible. I’m not sure why, but instead of sending a rejection slip back, I wrote a note on the back of the slip saying, “This is terrible. You should be ashamed of yourself. You obviously know how to write, so why don’t you send me the best short story you have?” And by return mail I got a seventy-five-page manuscript, Expect the Vandals. I read it and sent back a letter saying “This is flawed but I’m really interested. Do you want to work on it?” . . . So we went back and forth, and he kept changing it.

  By the time “Expect the Vandals” was accepted for the December 1958 issue, it had been trimmed down from novella length and polished to a high shine, and was probably better than its author would later remember (always with a shudder). Moe and Ken are the only survivors of an attempted landing on a Japanese-occupied atoll; the story’s original germ is touched on, provocatively, in its opening pages, when Moe observes from a ledge as the Japanese stragglers learn of their defeat: “Thirty-nine Japs had lined up, rifles in mouth. At the command, the triggers were pulled, and the tops of heads sailed into the air like confetti.” Jewishness is not a salient issue in the story, unless one associates Jewishness with the kind of sensitivity and discernment that Moe possesses and his buddy, Ken, does not, hence the poignancy of their interdependence. Queer studies scholars (who would come to show a remarkable degree of interest in Roth’s work) may one day rediscover the all-but-forgotten “Expect the Vandals,” with its startlingly overt homoeroticism: Moe’s nursing of the crippled Ken entails brushing a fly away from his naked groin, and kissing his forehead in a burst of tenderness.

  Perhaps the main importance of “Vandals” was the paycheck—$850—almost as much as Roth’s entire fellowship from the university. “I laughed all the way to the bank,” he said, when Solotaroff gloomily observed that the story wasn’t as funny as Roth’s pieces in The New Republic. And that wasn’t all: a year later, Columbia Pictures bought the dramatic rights for $2,000 plus a 10 percent cut of the profits—a meager sum by movie standards, but the production was low budget and anyway it was all gravy to Roth.†

  By then he’d already decided to quit school after a single quarter and devote his time to writing and teaching. “I strangled on Anglo-Saxon,” he wrote Miss Martin, “and kept thinking about stories I wanted to write while talking about stories Henry James did write.” Roth had other reasons to settle for an incomplete in Anglo-Saxon. After “The Conversion of the Jews” had been rejected for the third and fourth times—by Kenyon Review and Botteghe Oscure (“Those guineas’ll take anything,” Roth had mistakenly predicted of the latter)—the author “hopelessly” sent it off to The Paris Review, where it languished in a slush pile for five months before falling into the hands of a reader, Rose Styron, whose famous husband, William, was among Roth’s most admired near contemporaries. A few years later she’d have occasion to tell Roth in person about her role in publishing one of his best-known stories—the beginning of a lifelong friendship with the couple. For now she considered the story “marvelous,” but would have to wait for final approval from the editor, George Plimpton, who was then in Cuba. “Why the hell did he go, is what I want to know,” Roth complained to the Maurers. As he would shortly learn, Plimpton had gone to Cuba to conduct his famous interview with Hemingway, and that interview would appear, with “Conversion,” in the Spring 1958 issue. Roth’s story would receive further exposure in The Best American Short Stories of 1959.