But mostly it helped him preserve his sanity, which was parlously contingent on his productivity as a writer. “I know that I am a holy terror to live with if I haven’t been writing steadily,” he admitted, and so for the past year he’d been giving most of his waking hours, five or six days a week, to gouging out a big, impressive novel worthy of the youngest-ever winner of the National Book Award. After he’d written the first, relatively facile three hundred pages or so, the manuscript had been “slow going,” since Roth had gone over and over his early pages tinkering with point of view and tone (“it’s getting funny, thank god”) until it was essentially a different novel, whatever the sameness of plot. Indeed, with few exceptions (the title novella of Goodbye, Columbus was one), Roth would always find novel writing a ghastly protracted slog, for which his mantra would always be, in effect, I will not be defeated by this thing. In the case of the cumbersome Letting Go, he was further goaded by a wistful determination to get his book out “under the wire”—that is, before his thirtieth birthday.

  For this reason, mainly, he was having second thoughts about accepting Rust Hills’s invitation to appear at that year’s Esquire symposium in San Francisco—an event he’d publicly dismissed (in his NBA acceptance speech) as a silly and cynical waste of time, hence his being invited in the first place. Roth refused to commit himself until he knew the subject of that year’s symposium, and Hills wrote back asking him what he’d like it to be. Nothing, Roth specified, about the role, function, or condition of the writer, but rather about the actual writing. Hills happily obliged: “Writing in America Today” it was. In the end Roth agreed to go because, after all, it was an expenses-paid chance to see the West Coast—as he’d wished before being frog-marched to the Midwest—and even take a side trip to visit the Bakers in Oregon.

  Also, of course, he was flattered to be asked. The featured writers at the previous two symposia had been an illustrious bunch: Bellow, Wright Morris, Leslie Fiedler, and Dorothy Parker at the first, held at Columbia, and Ralph Ellison et al. in Iowa City. As it happened Roth had been in the audience at Columbia and was abidingly charmed by Bellow’s response to all the pontification “about isolation, alienation of the writer, etc.”: “Let the other fellow be alienated,” Bellow chuckled, when asked for his thoughts.* A certain amount of strife among the panelists was desirable, and, as The New York Times would report, it was hoped that young Roth would serve as a disputatious foil for his fellow panelists James Baldwin and John Cheever—but, as Roth noted, “If anything we had the unity of one of those combat details sent out on a night mission in movies about the Korean War—a Negro, a Protestant, and a Jew.” Roth had met Baldwin a few years before in New York and the two men got along warmly, whereas Cheever had been so smitten with Goodbye, Columbus that he was moved to write a rare note to its publisher: “This is not for publication because I don’t believe in setting a good book afloat on a spate of quotations but I would like to thank you for the immense pleasure I took in the Roth stories. It was my wife who said that she is very grateful to Mr. Roth for having proved to her that somebody lives in Newark.”†

  The program began October 20 at Berkeley, where Cheever was scheduled to speak followed by a panel discussion and questions; Roth would speak the next night at Stanford, and Baldwin the third night at San Francisco State. Roth was pleasantly startled to find that all three writers had much the same thing to say—“that is, the unmanageability of much of the American social scene as material for fiction.” In Roth’s judgment, the “most dimwitted” questions were asked that first night at Berkeley, where Cheever was accused of “anti-Americanism” and “willful obscurity”; also someone wanted to know if writers made a decent living, and “some poor woman,” reported Roth, “got up and in a quivering voice asked us some question about ‘the bard of Stratford,’ which I understood to be an unflattering comparison between that gentleman’s talents and the combined talents of the three of us on the stage.” At Stanford, the first question for Roth came from a woman seated near the front, who said she’d wanted to get a good look at him and then asked why he was so anti-Semitic (a subject Roth hadn’t raised in his remarks), while another man seemed almost angry: “If you don’t like it here, Mr. Roth, where else would you like to live, what other century, what other country?” Roth decided to pass on the question, and the man sat down with a vindicated look.

  What Roth had said to provoke such umbrage would soon be published as “Writing American Fiction,” to which he would facetiously refer in future years as the “Roth Doctrine.” Its composition had been a desperate business: leaving Libby Herz of Letting Go sitting in an analyst’s office for two weeks, Roth had become increasingly “edgy and mean and unstable” while he tried to think of something, anything, worth saying to a large and presumably literary audience at Stanford. Finally it occurred to him (apropos of the symposium’s theme) that none of the serious American novels Roth had read in the past two or three years had been about the big public scene, a matter that apparently had been consigned to lesser writers such as Drury, Herman Wouk, Sloan Wilson, and “Broadway’s amor-vincit-omnia boys”; perhaps the big public scene was simply too outlandish for first-rank writers to tackle with any confidence. By way of illustration, Roth opened with a lovingly prolix account of a notorious unsolved murder case in Chicago a few years back, when two sisters named Grimes had gone to an Elvis movie, Love Me Tender, and never returned; when at last a suspect was arrested, Benny Bed-well, “some good-natured soul” arranged for Benny’s mother to meet the murdered sisters’ mother: “Their picture is taken together,” Roth wrote, “two overweight, overworked American ladies, quite befuddled but sitting up straight for the photographers.”‡ How, Roth wondered, did an American writer at midcentury “make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. . . . Who, for example, could have invented Charles Van Doren? Roy Cohn and David Schine? . . . Eisenhower?” Roth went on to consider the work of various estimable fiction writers, and found all of them more or less concerned with private matters (“The only advice we seem to get from Salinger is to be charming on the way to the loony bin”)—which, to Roth’s mortification, would be construed by some readers to mean that he deplored this tendency in his peers’ work.

  Bernard Malamud would reach that conclusion a couple of days later when he heard Roth’s speech in Monmouth, Oregon, where Bob Baker had arranged an honorarium for his friend that would cover expenses for a long-awaited visit. Since 1957 Baker had been an English professor at the Oregon College of Education (later Western Oregon University), while back in 1949 Malamud had moved from New York to Corvallis (about twenty miles to the south), where he taught at Oregon State College (later Oregon State University). One of Roth’s pleasures in winning the National Book Award was that he’d succeeded Malamud, the 1959 winner for The Magic Barrel, to which the president of Baker’s college referred as The Pork Barrel when he introduced Malamud (standing) to the audience prior to Roth’s speech. A subsequent account in the Times would report that Roth, while at Stanford, had accused Malamud of “resorting to metaphors, rather than rendering society accurately,” an invidious formulation of his actual remarks (or so Roth thought), as follows:

  The Jews of The Magic Barrel and the Jews of The Assistant are not the Jews of New York City or Chicago. They are Malamud’s invention, a metaphor of sorts to stand for certain possibilities and promises and I am further inclined to believe this when I read the statement attributed to Malamud which goes, “All men are Jews.” . . . [H]is people live in a timeless depression and a placeless Lower East Side; their society is not affluent, their predicament is not cultural.

  Fair enough, but Malamud’s demeanor chez Baker afterward was on the dour side, and indeed Roth would learn that his elder had been a little affronted. (“If you mention a writer’s name without saying he’s the greatest writer in the world,” Roth remarked, “you put him down.”) Mind, it was hard to tell; at the best of times Malamud was not known for high spirits, and many remarked on his startling humorlessness, among them Roth, who would hear the man tell exactly two jokes (“Jewish dialect jokes, expertly recounted”) during the twenty-five years of their acquaintance.§ That night in Oregon, Malamud’s stolid lack of charisma reminded Roth of certain of Herman’s colleagues at Metropolitan Life. Toward the end of the evening, perhaps in hope of cheering their guest up, Baker and Roth eagerly inquired how he managed to produce world-class fiction given his heavy teaching and domestic responsibilities. As Baker recalled, “Patiently, exactly, he laid out for us the details of his MWF teaching, his TThSat writing and his Sunday familying—no swerving, no cheating on any element. Heading out, jaw set, he delivered his curtain line with quiet fervor: ‘I am a very disciplined man.’ And then he jerked open the door of—and stepped into—the closet.” Nobody laughed, least of all Malamud.

  RECENTLY SOLOTAROFF HAD dropped his dissertation on The Bostonians and taken a job as editor at Commentary, largely thanks to a long and well-received piece he’d written for the Times Literary Supplement on the Jewish role in American letters (an assignment for which Roth had recommended him, having declined to write it himself); as such he offered to publish Roth’s “Writing American Fiction” in their March 1961 issue, and Roth was eager for him to do so. Though Roth had been rather pleased with himself, at first, for having raised the tone of Esquire’s symposium by focusing on novels versus novelists (“I didn’t talk about Bellow, but about Henderson; not about Styron but Set This House on Fire, etc.”), he was infuriated by Robert Gutwillig’s account in the Times Book Review (“Dim Views Through Fog”) that seemed to suggest Roth had attacked the writers per se, instead of noticing certain tendencies in their work. “I was not, in R. G.’s phrase, ‘taking them to task,’ ” he wrote in his letter to the Times, “but trying to uncover the relationship between the self and the culture in two books, namely, Henderson the Rain King and Set This House on Fire.” As for the likes of Herman Wouk, Jerome Weidman, et al., he’d never said (pace Gutwillig) that they wrote “middle-class” novels: “I consider myself a member of that class. I said they wrote bad novels.” Gutwillig replied, with gentle disdain, that he’d been quoting not only from Roth’s prepared speech “but also from his frequent extemporaneous remarks and from his extended answers to questions from the audience”; it was possible he’d “oversimplified” or given “improper emphasis,” as Roth would have it, but he seriously doubted it.

  When Roth’s piece about the stupefying, sickening, infuriating nature of contemporary American reality ran in Commentary, its readers responded in much the same way as his more indignant interrogators at Stanford. “When we get a few more [letters],” Solotaroff wrote him, “so that we can take advantage of freight rates, I’ll send the whole lot to you for reply. I don’t think that any literary article in Commentary has provoked such controversy since Dwight MacDonald’s piece on Cousins [sic].”¶ Roth responded to the abuse with mischievous but determined clarity. “I love joy, especially sheer joy,” he assured Constance H. Poster, who’d wondered why Roth partook so little of the “sheer joy of mere existence expressed by most poets.” Roth continued: “My point as regards Henderson, however, is that the joy Bellow finds there he does not find in the world of Asa Leventhal or Tommy Wilhelm# or even Augie March, but in an Africa that makes no claim whatsoever to being real. That’s all.” Eugene Ziller took exception to Roth’s “complaint” against Malamud, whereas Roth insisted there was nothing of complaint in his point that “many contemporary writers”—himself included—seem to share a “discomfort” toward realism. “Where has [Roth] been all these millennia?” wondered Joseph Mindel of Larchmont, New York. “Hasn’t he heard about Sodom and Gomorrah, or listened to Isaiah and Jeremiah? Where was he during the dreadful days in the house of Agamemnon?” To Mindel’s parting shot that he suffered from “historical illiteracy,” Roth had this to say: “Okay—where were you during the dreadful days in the house of Agamemnon? Let’s stand up and be counted.”

  The controversy over a speech Roth had dashed off in a frenzy, after two weeks of pencil chewing, never quite went away. Two basic misreadings would continue to dog him: (a) that he’d been chiding his colleagues (“taking them to task”) for failing to write realistic novels about big sociopolitical issues; and, conversely, (b) that he and they should “avert their eyes” (as Tom Wolfe would put it) from the whole stupefying, sickening scene. As for Roth’s dismay over that scene as it stood in 1960 (never mind during the dreadful days in the house of Agamemnon), well, that would come to seem, by his own reckoning, naive. “Little did we know that some twenty years later the philistine ignorance on which we would have liked to turn our backs would infect the country like Camus’s plague,” he said in 1984; the wag who imagined a President Reagan, in 1960, would have been reviled for “perpetrating a crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness,” as opposed to brilliantly prophesying the rise of “a terrifyingly powerful world leader with the soul of an amiable, soap-opera grandmother . . . and intellectual equipment of a high school senior in a June Allyson musical”—the apotheosis of “American-style philistinism run amok.” And indignation over Reagan would itself seem very quaint indeed with the advent of President Trump, a multiple-bankrupt-casino-mogul-turned-reality-TV-star who would become, toward the end of Roth’s life, the terrifyingly powerful leader of the free world.

  Meanwhile the Roth Doctrine was memorably invoked in Tom Wolfe’s 1989 essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” in which the author jovially reproached Roth for discouraging “a generation of serious young writers” from even attempting “a realistic novel with the scope of Balzac, Zola, or Lewis”—that is to say, the kind of novel Wolfe himself had written, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which the “beast” had been wrestled to the ground by virtue of Wolfe’s strenuous legwork and sheer vaulting ambition. Roth had recently published a pretty ambitious novel in its own right, The Counterlife, while his friend Updike had just finished the last volume of his Rabbit Angstrom Tetralogy, but Roth didn’t specify these matters in his reply to Wolfe, who, he noted, had once (“albeit a bit drolly”) referred to him, Roth, as “the American Dickens”: “Maybe he doesn’t think much of my work now that he’s become a novelist himself. That’s okay, too. But that he should want to cast me, at this late date, in the role of the American Mallarmé who, with a single flourish of the pen, turned a whole generation against realism strikes me, frankly, as nuts.” To a subsequent interviewer Roth mildly remarked, “Tom’s strengths don’t lie in literary analysis.” Reminded that Wolfe now called Roth the best novelist of his generation, Roth clarified: “Tom Wolfe is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.”

  * A line Roth saved up for Felix Abravanel in The Ghost Writer: “Alienation? Oh,” he said, with that light laugh, “let the other guy be alienated.”

  † Bellow wasn’t the only colleague with a bon mot in The Ghost Writer. After reading The Professor of Desire, in 1977, Cheever wrote the author as follows: “[In 1959] I first read a paragraph or two of yours and came into the house shouting to Mary [his wife] that Roth—whoever he was—had the most compelling voice I had encountered in years. I don’t mean style; I mean voice—something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head.” Roth was so impressed with the compliment that he used it almost verbatim in his subsequent novel, attributing it to E. I. Lonoff.

  ‡ According to his 1957 Yaddo application (declined), one of Roth’s writing projects at the time had been a play about the Grimes sisters—not the murder per se, said Roth, so much as the lurid cultural phenomena attached to it.

  § In his life as in his fiction, Malamud’s humor (such as it was) tended to fly beneath even the most perceptive radar: “Bellow gets Nobel Prize,” he noted in his diary for October 21, 1976, “I win $24.25 in poker.”

  ¶ He means James Gould Cozzens, whose novel By Love Possessed (1957) Macdonald had savaged in “By Cozzens Possessed,” which arguably cost the novelist a Pulitzer and left his reputation in tatters.

  # The protagonists of Bellow’s The Victim and Seize the Day, respectively.

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  MAGGIE’S CHILDREN, RONALD AND HELEN, RODE THE train to Iowa every month or so. Roth and Bob Williams took them to football games, and over Christmas Roth and his faculty friend Vance Bourjaily went rabbit hunting with the twelve-year-old Ronald. At the time both kids seemed nice enough—especially the eager-toplease Helen—but Roth was still hoping to return to Europe after a single year in Iowa, all the more now that he was flush with Random House money. “So long as we are unencumbered with kids, I think we’ll try to keep on the move,” he wrote Solotaroff in October; “that is, live abroad someplace for a long stretch of time.”

  Maggie had other plans. Leaving her children alone with that “monster” Burt Miller was out of the question; it was their duty as parents to make sure Ronald and Helen had a proper home. For the twenty-seven-year-old Roth, “duty” was as potent a word as ever, having much to do with “manliness,” an even more prestigious value; thus he “compounded [his] entrapment preposterously,” as he later put it, “assuming responsibility for two bewilderingly raised, love-deprived, parent-bereft, ill-educated children, ten and twelve, slates no longer clean and badly shattered, who were not mine and whom I barely knew.” That pretty much covered it. As for the man he would badger for custody rights, Roth portrayed him as the well-meaning rube Roy Bassart in When She Was Good, and would increasingly come to believe that Miller was a mostly innocuous dolt (“He bought that book How to Be a Dummy for Dummies”) who, like himself, had had the bad luck of getting in Maggie’s way. Certainly Miller blamed Maggie for Roth’s adverse opinion circa 1961: “Because of what Maggie told him, he thought I was an unfit father. . . . But he didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on.”