On arriving in the British Isles they were joined by the Styrons, with whom they hired a cab and toured Wales and Ireland. By then Set This House on Fire had been published to scathing reviews, though at least one had been quite positive, and this Styron kept in an inside jacket pocket and would furtively peruse (as Roth noticed in the rearview mirror) from time to time. While their wives went shopping in Dublin, the men embarked on a “Joycean trek” around the city that was supposed to wind up at the Guinness brewery, where they’d been promised a fascinating guided tour. On the way Roth remarked that the Irish were a terribly repressed people; if you looked directly at the women, he said, they automatically hid their bosoms (“he was right,” Styron noted). The brewery was closed, Trinity Library was covered in “hideous scaffolding,” the River Liffey was “full of mud and garbage,” and finally the two writers escaped a dreary drizzle by ducking into a shooting gallery and whiling away the afternoon playing pinball and mugging in photo booths. Later Styron would remember Roth’s “ability to convert these ghastly dead ends and moments of existential insult into an episode of both genuine gravity and high hilarity. It was one of the truly memorable days of my life, and among the most richly enjoyed.”

  In London, the Roths were again fortunate in their lodgings, subletting a top-floor flat at 89 Redington Road, in Hampstead, from the rector of St. Mary-le-Bow. Their dining room afforded a splendid view of the city, and Roth was able to immure himself in a book-lined study. On nearby Flask Walk was the poet and critic Al Alvarez, then poetry editor for The Observer, a champion of contemporary American poets such as Plath, Berryman, and Lowell. “He’s in the same shit I am,” Alvarez observed of Roth, when he and his wife, Ursula, went to dinner that first time on Redington Road. As he later wrote, “We became friends from the start because both of us, back then, were edgy young men with failing marriages and a nose for trouble, who believed, as literary folk did back in the high-minded ’50s, that literature was the most honorable of all callings and were baffled when life didn’t work out as books had led us to expect.” The seeds of friendship would flower more fully in 1977—long after their “nightmare wives” (Alvarez) had vanished—when Roth began spending half-years in London only to find his domestic life as problematic as ever.

  Meanwhile things were relatively tranquil in Hampstead until mid-July, when Maggie got word from Daddy Herb that a throat culture had revealed her mother’s lungs “were full of cancer,” and that she had “two weeks possibly three” to live. On July 17, Roth wrote Baker that Maggie had phoned South Haven “and decided finally not to go back on the advice of her grandfather, who says her mother recognizes no one, etc.” However, as Roth later remembered the episode, Daddy Herb had actually “pleaded with her to come back and be with her mother during the few weeks she was expected to live.” Roth offered to pay her way, but he couldn’t afford to go himself; they were on a strict budget and had already booked passage back to the States for September 1. “I’m not leaving you alone,” said Maggie. “You’ll fuck everybody in London!” “I was very sad to recieve [sic] your letter this morning,” she wrote Daddy Herb and Aunt Hervey on August 2. “Although I didn’t really believe the new medicine would do miricles [sic], I had selfishly perhaps, hoped it would keep Mother alive until I got there.” Amid furious bouts of weeping, she berated Roth for keeping her away from her mother’s side as she lay dying.

  Truth be known, Roth hadn’t wanted to return to the States at all, much less to take another teaching job. “I want no part of the academic community, meetings, chickenshit, nonsense, politicking, etc.,” he wrote the Maurers from Rome on April 11. “Had enough at Chicago in two years to last me and mine for ever.” In a better world, he would have stayed in Rome indefinitely and had a string of Italian girlfriends; he was confident he’d get at least a $15,000 advance for Letting Go, and since he thought he could easily live in Rome for a thousand a year. . . . But reality was something else, and by April 18—a mere week after his exultant manifesto to the Maurers—Maggie wrote to inform Paul Brooks, at Houghton, that her husband would be taking a job at either Stanford or Iowa in the fall. That spring Maggie had learned that her first husband, Burt Miller, and his second wife were divorcing after only a year of marriage, and Maggie insisted that she and Roth had to get back to the States as soon as possible to save her “babies” from the sole guardianship of that “wicked simpleton.”

  If Roth couldn’t have Rome, he’d at least hoped for the sunny climes of Palo Alto, but no: Iowa City was a few hours away from Maggie’s children in the Chicago area, so Iowa City it was. Explaining their choice to friends, Roth mentioned the advantage of proximity (“I think that’ll be good for everyone”), and also claimed the money was better at Iowa. In fact, the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Paul Engle—“a gonif ” (thief), as Roth would forever describe him—had offered him a mere $5,500 a year, “perhaps the sorriest salary in the history” of the Workshop, as Roth would learn soon enough; he even had to cover moving expenses and reimburse Engle for $125 the man had put down on a rental house for his new faculty member. To be sure, as the youngest-ever winner of the National Book Award, Roth was a hot property—but, after all, he’d approached Engle, not vice versa, and somewhat at the last moment too, so Engle figured he was doing Roth a favor.

  * In the joke, a country-club member, Shapiro, is trying to persuade others to invite his friend Tannenbaum to be a member, while one of the latter’s violent detractors, Ginsberg, dozes nearby. From the novel: “Nathan’s voice grows incomparably oleaginous, gross with fatuity and edged with just the perfect trace of Yiddish as he limns Shapiro’s quaveringly hopeful apostrophe to Max Tannenbaum. ‘To tell what a great human being Max Tannenbaum is I must use the entire English alphabet! From A to Z I will tell you about this beautiful man! . . . A he is Admirable. B he is Beneficial. C he is Charming. D he is Delightful. . . .’ ” Around the letter “I,” Ginsberg wakes up and says, “ ‘J joost a minute! (Majestic pause) K he’s a Kike! L he’s a Lummox! M he’s a Moron! N he’s a Nayfish! O he’s an Ox! P he’s a Prick! Q he’s a Queer! R he’s a Red! S he’s a Shlemiel! T he’s a Tochis! U you can have him! V ve don’t want him! W X Y Z—I blackball the shmuck!’ ”

  † The other fiction judges that year were Kay Boyle, Alexander Laing, William Peden (who’d reviewed Roth’s collection for the Times Book Review), and Charles J. Rolo.

  CHAPTER

  Sixteen

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HAD AN OPTION ON ROTH’S NEXT two books, but on June 22, 1960, Starbuck got a call from Candida Donadio, whose sad duty it was to explain her client’s “prolonged and intense dissatisfaction” with Houghton’s handling of Goodbye, Columbus. As Starbuck reported to Brooks, Roth’s discontents included Houghton’s “tight-fistedness” (the plane ticket, etc.), a shoddy production job on the book itself (“minute printing”), and their “gross mishandling of his brother’s design for the jacket.” In the last case: Roth had originally requested the designer Milton Glaser, whose jacket for Malamud’s The Magic Barrel he’d admired (and who would go on to design a lion’s share of Roth’s later books), but Glaser “screwed it up”; Sandy was happy to do the work for free, and “came up with a pretty good, gay jacket,” as Philip thought—a naked woman standing at a window, her back to the viewer, with a prominent bowl of fruit in the foreground. Sandy’s version was brightly colored, with a lot of yellow sunlight that Houghton, for whatever reason, changed to gray; the mild-mannered Sandy had been angry enough to phone the publisher and denounce them as “a bunch of pricks.” “Received the book,” Roth wrote Starbuck on March 29, 1959; “am happy, really. Except about that m-f cover.”

  Roth had exempted Starbuck from his general indictment of Houghton, and indeed would later claim his main reason for changing publishers was Starbuck’s departure (though Starbuck didn’t actually leave until the following year, and had no immediate plans to leave at the time). Meanwhile Roth had complained to friends that “the people are sweet, but it’s like being published by Ginn and Company, who aren’t even in business anymore; no, Funk and Wagnalls”—until Styron arranged a lunch, in Rome, between Roth and Donald Klopfer of Random House. “I think that the whole Philip Roth business is deplorable,” noted the gentlemanly Brooks, when he caught wind that Klopfer had offered Roth a minimum $20,000 advance on his novel and a guaranteed advertising budget of $5,000, and had promised moreover to top any offer Houghton was willing to make, option or no. Roth hoped such daunting largesse would cause Houghton to back down and release him outright, but Starbuck (“in fairness to Phil, since we felt we could do a superior job of promoting his next book”) gently insisted that they be allowed at least to consider a partial manuscript of Debts and Sorrows (as it was still called).

  “FIVE OF US INCLUDING MYSELF HAVE NOW READ FIRST THREE HUNDRED PAGES OF DEBTS AND SORROWS WITH ENORMOUS ENTHUSIASM AND INCREASED RESPECT,” Brooks cabled Roth on July 22. “WE ALL FEEL THAT THIS WILL BE ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS WE HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED TO PUBLISH AND WE INTEND TO BACK IT TO THE LIMIT.” Houghton matched Random’s $20,000 and guaranteed an even higher advertising budget—but the implications of the plane ticket still rankled. By early fall, Donadio thought it a “propitious time” for a formal release, and a couple of weeks later Roth signed a contract with Random House for a $21,000 advance, payable in three installments—one of only two times he’d ever accept money before a book’s completion.

  BY THEN the Roths had moved into a pleasant white clapboard house on verdant North Linn Street, with a faint view of the Iowa River from an upstairs window. Roth was new to small-town Midwestern life, and was taken aback by the aggressive friendliness of perfect strangers; as he wrote in “a stupid, complaining piece” about Iowa City that would appear in a 1962 Esquire (“Iowa: A Very Far Country Indeed”), he found himself beguiled into conversation almost every time he ventured out to buy milk or razor blades. By way of settling in, he’d subscribed for a time to the state’s largest daily, The Des Moines Register, but amid the presidential campaign of 1960 he couldn’t stomach the paper’s politics. The better to convey the local ethos to Styron, he sent a postcard with an oafish joke printed on the front (“WORK IS THE CURSE OF THE DRINKING CLASS”); on the back he’d written:

  Dear Styrone-

  We have read youre’ book BURN THIS PLACE DOWN and such filth and smut hasn’t enterd our lives in a long time, th. GOD. We can only feel sorry for you, and warn you to keep clear of Iowa if you KNOW whats gd. for you.

  Signed CLAUDE & IDA RUNKLE

  Another thing Roth would complain about in his Esquire piece was the byzantine ordeal of buying liquor at the only state-licensed store in a town of 33,000, which entailed a certain amount of paperwork and waiting. The only tipple available over the counter was beer (3.2), which he and Maggie usually drank at Kenney’s Bar, since it was right around the corner from the one theater where they occasionally saw a movie. That was about it for nightlife.

  In fact Roth enjoyed himself; because there was so little to do in that “rosy-cheeked town,” the Workshop writers went out of their way to entertain themselves. As he wrote Solotaroff in November, “I had forgotten, truly, that there were pleasures to be had in social contacts—after all the ambitiousness of NY socializing, and Rome—but I am discovering it again, and it is a great source of joy.” Roth relished the male camaraderie of the place: he and Bob Williams were all but inseparable, especially on Saturdays, when (after sleeping in from Friday night poker parties) they made a point of attending home football games, while Saturdays in spring were given over to softball games between the poetry and prose writers. Mark Strand was then a graduate student whose first wife, Antonia, was in Roth’s fiction class, and he often pitched for the poets’ team; forty years later—in a tribute he wrote for the presentation of Roth’s Gold Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters—Strand praised his old foe’s hitting prowess almost as lavishly as he praised American Pastoral.

  Roth’s back had stopped hurting him (for the time being) and he was also able to play tennis with a Korean graduate student roughly his age, Richard Kim, who’d been born Kim Eun Kook in North Korea and served as a general’s adjutant in the South Korean army during the war. Kim had learned colloquial English from watching American movies in the army, and during his years in Iowa he worked on his novel about the Korean War, The Martyred—a copy of which his widow, Penelope, noticed near Roth’s elbow in a 2013 PBS documentary about Roth. She promptly wrote him a letter, pointing out that her late husband’s novel had recently been reissued as a Penguin Classic and thanking Roth for his part in its success (“I consider you its godfather”). Roth had read the book in drafts, and when it was finished, in 1963, he helped Kim find a publisher, George Braziller, and pressed the book on friends such as Styron (noting “the sheer fucking heroism that must have gone into the writing”). The book was nominated for the National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages.

  Roth’s best friend on the faculty was George P. Elliott, whose wife, Mary Emma, was editor of The Hudson Review. George was a big man, fond of food and drink, and both husband and wife were fun-loving but high-minded in conversation. George was about to publish his story collection, Among the Dangs, which included one of his first published stories, from 1949, “The NRACP”—an acronym for National Relocation Authority: Colored Persons, which, it gradually transpires, is actually a program of genocide against black Americans, who are surreptitiously turned into canned dog food. In later years, as the civil rights movement became increasingly beset by violence, such caustic satire would seem more prescient, but at the time it managed to offend readers of almost every political stripe, or anyway such readers as Elliott was ever able to attract. His relatively innocuous novels included Parktilden Village and David Knudsen, about which Roth’s opinion may be inferred from a 1967 letter recommending Elliott for a Rockefeller grant: “The impact he makes on the American consciousness, as both a critic and a novelist”—a poet too—“will largely be determined by the work he is to do, and not the work he has done.” Both George and Mary Emma provided vital feedback throughout Roth’s progress on Letting Go (a title they suggested), and at one point Roth proposed George as an alternate executor of his literary estate. The Roths were bereft when the Elliotts departed Iowa in 1961 (“we’re even a little leery of next year without them”), and Philip kept occasionally in touch once they landed at Syracuse University in 1963. Alas, by the time George dropped dead of a heart attack in 1980, he was forgotten by the reading public, and Roth eventually lost track of Mary Emma as well.

  GIVEN HIS NEGLIGIBLE SALARY, Roth was relieved that his teaching load, at least, was light. That first semester he taught a single two-hour workshop on Mondays and held individual conferences on Tuesdays, and the rest of his time was mostly his own. Six students would submit stories each week, and Roth would choose the two best (or most conducive to discussion) and mimeograph them for his other students in advance of the Monday session. Roth was dubious about the efficacy of “teaching” (a word he liked to entomb in quotes) writing as a craft, but he did find value in “educating the students in the workings of the literary imagination”—that is, in asking such questions as “Why this story in the first place? What is the necessity for your telling it and my reading it? Why is the story ‘important’?”

  As Paul Engle was apt to point out, the brightest people at the University of Iowa were the writers (“The most brilliant scholars go to Harvard . . . but where can the writers go except here and Stanford?”), but Roth saw little evidence of that in his own students’ “atrocious” work. “Not only do you have to read the crap,” he complained, “but then you have to think about it and discuss it, tenderly, with them.” Among his own workshop group that first year, the only writer he considered promising was Mary Elsie Robertson, whose first collection, Jordan’s Stormy Banks, had been accepted by Atheneum for publication in the spring. “I don’t think we were a very illustrious lot,” Robertson agreed many years later, remembering Roth’s teaching manner as “affable” but to the point. By most accounts Roth did his best to mask his exasperation with middling work, but his reluctance to mince words resulted in hurt feelings from time to time. “Part of our function,” he told an interviewer, “is to discourage those without enough talent. A lot of people come for self-expression or therapy. We try to put a stop to that.”

  Roth’s later pronouncements on MFA programs were even more categorical: “I think it’s a great waste of time,” he said in 2012. “Get them the fuck out of there. They should shut all those places down.” Teaching students how to read—versus write—was another matter. During his second semester at Iowa, Roth taught a Contemporary Fiction course, and this he enjoyed and would always enjoy. Then and later, Roth liked to teach books in tandem, the better to demonstrate the different ways authors approach similar themes in terms of craft and moral point of view: Bowen’s Death of the Heart and Golding’s Lord of the Flies; Bellow’s The Victim and Malamud’s The Assistant. At Iowa, too, he made things easier for himself by assigning each student to teach at least one novel on the syllabus (an idea he might have retained from his bravura lecture on Mario and the Magician for Willard Smith’s class at Bucknell), which forced them to study the book intensively as well as work on their pedagogy.