“Maggie and I must confuse hell out of you—or I must,” Roth wrote the Maurers on April 10. “But we are back being Friends Again, or we are the most enjoyable people we know, and the inevitable end we’re just ignoring, etc etc.” Norman Mailer was coming to campus that month as the latest writer to visit Stern’s class, and Maggie and Roth decided to give a party “for just about everybody we knew in Hyde Park” and asked Stern to invite his celebrated guest. Once again Roth made a point of sitting quietly in back of the class while Mailer held forth, and Stern told him afterward that Mailer had particularly inquired about him and remarked, “It’s those silent guys you have to watch out for.” At the party, however, Mailer showed up with a glamorous local painter, June Leaf, and he and Roth had “a brief easygoing conversation” about how much Roth admired The Naked and the Dead. The party was a big success in every way—“all of bohemian Chicago was there”—and Roth was impressed by how well Maggie acquitted herself as hostess.

  It would prove the latest Last Hurrah for the two. Roth was leaving Chicago in May, and Maggie was even more relentless than expected in letting him know her displeasure. Always—and rather shrewdly, from a tactical perspective—she made a point of impugning his moral and emotional stability. His abandonment of her was “wicked” and “irresponsible,” and again (as before when he’d tried to end things) she declared him “unable to love” and urged him to see a psychiatrist. “She also told me that the reason I couldn’t stay with one woman was not because I was an exuberant, libidinous young man in his twenties but because I was ‘a latent homosexual,’ ” Roth recalled. “That pseudo-Freudian label was used very freely in those years about young men who . . . might not want to marry the women who might want to marry them.” “It makes me angry to think I had so much to give and it actually was so satisfying to us both and still Philip rejects,” Maggie wrote in her journal. “How stupid he is.”

  Not without cause, Roth felt sheepish about enticing her to move to New York and did his best to make sure she at least had gainful employment once she got there. As luck would have it, Lichtenstein was taking a sabbatical from Esquire that created a temporary opening for a slush-pile reader, and at Roth’s urging he got his boss, Rust Hills, to hire Maggie. “A very dear friend of mine has just come to New York,” Roth presently wrote Bob Silvers and others. “Her name is Margaret [Miller] and she is a totally charming woman. I suspect she’s going to be lonely for a while and anxious to meet people.” By then he and Maggie had parted on ostensibly friendly terms; she’d asked for his itinerary in Europe so she could write him, and hoped he would write her back. Roth was left with an impression of Maggie at her best and was far from alone, later, in wondering at the unusual duality of her nature. “I really feel like one born without one of the senses but it’s really that I have no conscience,” she’d written in her journal that April. “I have the mind to reason what is right and wrong but I have no moral repugnance to keep me from anything but I have [a] huge amount of self pity where my wickedness keeps me from having the good things that life gives to good girls.”

  * Roth was still reviewing movies during the Fall 1957 semester; his final piece for The New Republic was published in the February 17, 1958, issue.

  † The movie, Battle of Blood Island, was shot in Puerto Rico in the summer of 1959, on a budget of $51,579 mostly put up by the legendary B-movie director Roger Corman, who appears in a cameo as an American soldier. Roth’s windfall would not include a profit percentage, since the movie grossed only $28,828.

  ‡ Ron Patimkin’s model, Paul Groffsky—every bit as nice and obliging as Roth had led me to expect—claimed he never read Goodbye, Columbus (or even watched the movie), explaining that he preferred “mainly nineteenth-century authors, particularly Dickens and George Eliot.”

  § To wit: For his birthday, a husband gets two ties from his mother-in-law. Wishing to seem a good son-in-law, he wears one of them to the next family dinner. Upon seeing her, he tries a friendly smile, but is met with a disappointed look. “So, you didn’t like the other one?”

  ¶ Roth didn’t write Goodbye, Columbus—which also has sex scenes—until the following February.

  CHAPTER

  Eleven

  ROTH DEPARTED ON JUNE 6, 1958, ABOARD THE STAATENDAM, occupying himself either with Ping-Pong or reading in a deck chair. From Southampton he took a train to London and found a bed-and-breakfast around the corner from the British Museum. That first day (on Miss Martin’s recommendation) he saw the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles, then after dinner he “stumbled on Soho” and found the sidewalks crowded with prostitutes. “I made a circuit of Soho Square and then chose one,” he remembered, “who led me up a steep flight of stairs to a small room where our business was quickly transacted.” The rest of that rainy week he dutifully visited every site he knew in London of literary significance, from Donne’s church to Carlyle’s house and various other places relevant to writers he’d encountered in Baugh’s Literary History of England.

  In Paris he stayed at a little Left Bank hotel that Jacquie Rogers had recommended and lost no time looking up the local editor of The Paris Review, Nelson Aldrich—“a handsome young man of qualities,” as Roth put it, whose background could scarcely have been more different than his own. The great-grandson and namesake of a Republican senator, Aldrich was a product of St. Paul’s and Harvard; he’d read a couple of Roth’s stories and knew the author was roughly his own age, but whatever he expected fell short of the actuality: “I don’t think I’ve ever so quickly been attracted to a man,” said Aldrich. “I felt that we were boys together talking about girls. We didn’t talk about books or writers—we talked about Paris and its delights.” The young men drifted from one café to the next, and after Roth had met Aldrich’s girlfriend, Jill, she remarked to Aldrich, “Very funny man but I felt he was always looking up my skirt.”

  On a Tuesday night in early July, Roth was presented with the Aga Khan Prize at the splendid Bois de Boulogne residence of Prince Aly Khan, the son of Aga Khan III (“the staggeringly rich leader of the Ismaili Muslims”) and third husband of Rita Hayworth. As Roth reported, a little high-mindedly, to Miss Martin: “There were all kinds of elegant people with titles there, and a Match photographer took my picture, and all of it had absolutely so little to do with writing, and even with me, that it was in the end rather more pathetic than comic.” Roth refrained from mentioning the ruckus caused at one point when the butler detained his date, a young woman on a motorbike whom he’d picked up at the Café Odeon; she loudly insisted she was invited until Roth went downstairs to sort things out. After the party, a group repaired to the Left Bank for dinner, and Roth found himself sitting next to the writer Irwin Shaw, who every so often would remind him, over the years, that he still had an open invitation to visit the Shaws in Paris or Switzerland.

  Since getting out of the army two years before, Roth’s life had been a heavy (if mostly fruitful) grind of writing and teaching and coping with Maggie; that summer he allowed himself “to do absolutely nothing,” or anyway he didn’t bother to write. With a friend from Chicago, he met two Swedish girls and paired off with one of them, Monica—“a wonderful interlude” that lasted two or three weeks before Roth decided to head south to Italy at the end of July. (Monica invited him to visit her in Sweden, and soon enough Roth would sorely regret not having taken her up on it.) At the American Express Roth hitched a ride with two countrymen, stopping along the way at Carcassonne, Arles, Avignon, and Nice; he was felled by a sudden attack of back pain in Livorno, and had to lie down in a hotel for a few days. Finally he strapped himself into his steel brace and caught a train to Florence.

  “I’m fond of looking at Paris, but it was Florence that really charmed me thoroughly,” he wrote Miss Martin. “I was there five days and left foolishly for Venice, where I lasted about 36 hours. I had the feeling that if I wrote out a big enough check there, someone would sell me San Marco.” In Florence Roth had been struck by the piquant incongruity of vulgar Americans and gorgeous, abiding art (“Every surface in the city, the bastards painted”), but he soon returned to Paris to spend a few weeks “calmly alone,” reflecting on his latest good fortune.

  Back in February he’d heard from his old Chicago friend George Starbuck, who’d also quit graduate school and taken a job as editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston; Starbuck had been following Roth’s career with interest and wondered whether he was working on a novel. Roth replied that he was indeed working on something set in Frankfurt, The Go-Between, but was particularly excited about a long story he was just then completing, Goodbye, Columbus; he wondered whether it was hefty enough to submit (perhaps as part of a larger collection?) for their Houghton Mifflin Fellowship ($2,500), the oldest publisher-sponsored award of its kind: “I shall be twenty-five next week and stouter,” Roth wrote, “and feel a tiny knife in my side as I race to be a boy wonder.” Such was his hurry that he held fast when Starbuck pressed him only for the unfinished novel; Roth understood “the prejudice against books of stories from novelless writers,” but felt certain that Goodbye, Columbus “could have a very wide appeal, perhaps to that same group who buy Salinger by the thousands.” Finally, when Roth threatened to take his work elsewhere, Starbuck agreed to consider both the novella and a fragment of The Go-Between. The New Yorker and Esquire, meanwhile, had both passed on the long and problematic Goodbye, Columbus, but Roth’s friends at The Paris Review were willing to publish every word of it (“It looks as though it’s going to take up the whole magazine,” he wrote the Maurers, “tra la”), as early as their Autumn–Winter 1958 issue—meaning that three consecutive issues would feature work by the young and still rather unknown Philip Roth.

  That left the editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin, Paul Brooks, with a “knotty publishing problem” as he wrote in an internal memo. Given that Goodbye, Columbus was to be published in full by The Paris Review, it made sense for Houghton to combine it with other stories (“on the pattern of Carson McCullers’ BALLAD OF SAD CAFE”): “One difficulty, perhaps, is that the denouement hinges on an incident involving a contraceptive apparatus—and it is hard to see how this could be changed without rewriting the whole story.” As for Roth’s other manuscript—“57 pages and a synopsis of a novel set in Frankfurt”—it had been received with “the greatest enthusiasm” by Starbuck, but Brooks and two of their colleagues (both of whom knew Frankfurt) were not “nearly so enthusiastic,” Brooks noted. “It seems to me that the difference between this and his American writing is the difference between a story that starts with an intellectual idea and a story that embodies the life that the author has lived.” Such was the astute reasoning that led, five days later, to their offering Roth a $1,000 advance to publish Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories, whereas the novel would remain “under consideration for a Fellowship” pending submission of a more complete manuscript. Roth got the news on August 4 in Paris and was “thrilled”—but then his agent, Donadio, negotiated a counteroffer of $2,500 from Viking, which Houghton promptly agreed to match and publish the collection as a prestigious Houghton Mifflin Fellowship Book. Whereupon Roth wired Napier Wilt, requesting a yearlong leave of absence.

  ROTH BOARDED THE Hanseatic on August 21, 1958, in Hamburg, and spent much of the crossing in the company of a young English architect, Vernon Gibberd. One evening they stood on deck watching the sun go down, and the moment it slipped behind the horizon, Roth broke into raucous applause that caused a few of his fellow passengers to chuckle nervously and others to edge away with offended looks. The cumulative effect of such antics was charming: “In the right mood,” said Gibberd, “he was the greatest company in the world.” Roth divided the two-volume Olympia Press edition of Lolita between them, to be smuggled into the States as contraband, only to find the Putnam edition had been published in America that very month. Also Roth managed to have an affair on the boat and worried, in passing, that the woman might get pregnant. “He was pretty laissez-faire about these things,” Gibberd observed.

  Roth and Maggie had corresponded steadily over the summer, and (outward behavior to the contrary) Roth’s heart had grown a bit fonder in her absence. “She is a rare person,” he wrote Solotaroff, “and if I were a little rarer I’d have not screwed things up so often.” He made it clear he wanted her to stay in New York rather than return to Chicago after her Esquire job ended, and when his ship came in she was standing on the pier, waving radiantly in a white dress that made her look like a summer bride (“Maybe that was the idea”).

  Gene Lichtenstein had also gone to Europe for the summer, while his wife, Cynthia, a second-year law student at Yale, stayed behind to clerk for a firm in New York; as it happened she was house-sitting for the poet W. H. Auden and his partner, Chester Kallman, who liked to spend half the year in Ischia, off the coast of Italy. Cynthia, a Philadelphia debutante and Radcliffe graduate, didn’t like the dirty Bowery or Auden’s dirty apartment, though the worst part by far was her roommate: Maggie. “I don’t want a strange man coming here overnight! How dare he!” the latter railed in one case, when Cynthia proposed letting an old friend, Tony Bailey, sleep over while in town from Connecticut. Though Cynthia was formidable in her own right, she was so taken aback by the older woman’s fury that she allowed herself to be browbeaten. The whole summer was like that. Meanwhile Roth and her husband bumped into each other in Paris and whiled away the afternoon in a café. “Too bad there’s not a war on,” Roth laughed. “We could send the girls letters about how hard life is here in Europe.” “All I care to say is that the portrait Philip painted of Maggie in his later novel [My Life as a Man] was quite an accurate one,” Cynthia noted. She remembered Roth asking her—at a time when he and Maggie were freshly estranged—“Why didn’t you warn me?” Said Cynthia in 2015, bitter still: “I didn’t because neither man” (Roth or her ex-husband) “paid any attention to me or cared what I thought and never thought to inquire how my summer had gone.”

  Soon after his return, Roth finally cracked The New Yorker. Fiction editor Rachel MacKenzie had been cultivating him ever since reading “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” in the November 1957 Commentary, struck by its congenial blend of “humor and seriousness.” Roth reminded her that his then agent McCrindle had already sent the magazine a version of “Epstein”—which, not surprisingly, was found to have too much shmutz, whereas Goodbye, Columbus was too long (and dirty enough in its own right). The first piece they bought was a brief “casual” for the back of the magazine, “The Kind of Person I Am,” inspired by partygoers in Hyde Park who presume to pigeonhole the author—“Oh that’s the kind of person you are”—based on the books he reads and so forth (“They’re so goddamned infuriating,” Roth wrote the Maurers, “not to mention boring, that I wrote this piece”). Around this time Roth also finished “Defender of the Faith” and was certain it was “the best thing I’ve done.”* On October 6, 1958, MacKenzie wrote Roth: “I shall be grieved and distressed if it doesn’t go through—I felt, reading it, that special excitement you feel when you come on a first-rate, perfectly controlled story—but it may offer problems for us.” There would, in fact, be problems galore, but for now the story had found its way into Mr. Shawn’s briefcase and was finally bought, on October 27, for a staggering $2,200.

  The story is neither “sensitive” nor leavened much with humor, and hence Roth’s enduring satisfaction with it; the notion of Jewish solidarity has rarely been so pitilessly tested in the nuanced light of human nature. “Let the goyim clean the floors!” Private Grossbart cackles, overheard by his sergeant, Nathan Marx, a decent man who has released Grossbart and two other Jews from barracks-cleaning duty so they can attend shul. So convincing is Grossbart’s piety, at other times, that Marx can hardly believe his ears, and soon his tribal fellow-feeling is tested again when Grossbart complains about the trafe (non-kosher food) the army makes them eat: “ ‘That’s what happened in Germany,’ Grossbart was saying, loud enough for me [Marx] to hear. ‘They didn’t stick together. They let themselves get pushed around.’ ” It’s the summer of 1945, at a training camp in Missouri; both Marx and his gentile captain, Barrett, have survived terrible combat in Europe, and the captain, at least, is astonished by Grossbart’s audacity about the trafe.

  “Do you hear [Marx] peeping about the food? Do you? I want an answer, Grossbart. Yes or no.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And why not? He’s a Jewish fella.”

  “Some things are more important to some Jews than other things to other Jews.”

  Barrett blew up. “Look, Grossbart. Marx, here, is a good man—a goddam hero. When you were in high school, Sergeant Marx was killing Germans. . . .”

  But Marx himself is all too susceptible to what seems, at least, a sincere sense of entitlement. And Grossbart doesn’t hesitate to impugn his character, in the most galling way imaginable, to get what he wants:† “I’ve run into this before . . . but never from my own!” he says, when Marx hesitates to give him a pass (“No passes during basic”) so he can have a proper Seder meal with relatives in St. Louis. “They say that Hitler himself was half a Jew,” Grossbart persists, before bursting into tears. Lest he seem Hitlerian even to himself, Marx goes so far as to sign passes (in the captain’s name) not only for Grossbart but his two buddies, and is rewarded with an egg roll rather than the gefilte fish he requested. There was, in fact, no Seder; the whole ruse—Hitler and tears—was for the sake of a day’s escape to a Chinese restaurant. In the end, however, Grossbart is left weeping in earnest, when Marx thwarts his ploy to get out of being sent to the Pacific with the rest of his company. “There’s no limit to your anti-Semitism, is there?” Grossbart rages. “You really want me dead!” “You’ll be all right,” Marx says, repressing an urge to seek pardon for his not inconsiderable vindictiveness.