2 JEWISH WRITERS OPPOSE RESTRAINT was the Times headline concerning the final session in Tel Aviv, where Roth and Fiedler joined forces in refusing to apologize for writers—preeminently Roth himself—who insisted on creating unsympathetic Jewish characters in their fiction. “I can’t let ignorance and prejudice set the framework for my expression,” said Roth, recapitulating his argument from the Yeshiva University disaster, when he could have used Fiedler as a wingman: “A good honest piece of literature,” the critic rallied round, “cannot sustain totalitarianism or abet ignorance because a good piece of literature is in itself a microcosmic utopian state.” During the Q&A, an indignant fellow wondered how Roth could contribute to Jewish thought in America without some “knowledge of Jewish history, and of the Hebrew language?” Forbearing to mention his three years at Talmud Torah, Roth replied (as he often would over the course of his career), “I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew.” The audience’s response, according to the Times, was “disapproving.” Another questioner wanted to know whether Roth was enough of a Jew (“even the empty psychological shell”) to come to Israel for a prolonged stay: “You could then learn about what is going on here and even create fiction from the experience.” Roth said that such research was for the likes of James Michener, whereas “the writer who is serious does not seem to me to pursue subjects or places, but is pursued by them”; twenty years later, however, Roth would be positively Michenerian in his dogged travel to Israel, the better to research aspects of The Counterlife and Operation Shylock.

  Armed with letters of introduction from his Israeli copanelists, Roth spent the next three weeks looking up writers, professors, and kibbutzniks around the country, then proceeded to London for the rest of the summer. A day or two after his arrival, Roth met the ABC radio journalist Rod MacLeish, who offered Roth his apartment on Chelsea Embankment, free of charge, when Roth admitted he’d yet to find permanent lodgings. At loose ends—unable to write, yet cheerful withal given the absence of Maggie—Roth picked up a Chinese prostitute on Curzon Street one morning.* WHEN WRITERS AREN’T WRITING THEY BEHAVE LIKE PEOPLE was a New York Times Book Review headline, in August, that seemed to fit such an episode in Roth’s life, but instead the roving Times photographer had snapped Roth in the act of buying plums and cherries at a London market (reminiscent of Neil Klugman’s relish for the Patimkins’ fruit), and also captured Bellow erecting a scarecrow in Tivoli, New York, and Capote checking under the hood of his Jaguar. “Not only am I buying cherries in the New York Times photograph,” Roth wrote the Rogerses, “I am also going bald.” During that visit to London he’d noticed this unhappy development (after getting an especially short haircut) for the first time; thereafter, whenever he performed cunnilingus, he was “always aware of them looking down on [his] bald head.”

  Roth had a jolly time in London. His old friend from that first summer in Amagansett, Mordecai Richler, was living there with his wife, Florence, and introduced Roth to their bibulous social circle. He also forged an enduring friendship with the writer Julian Mitchell, who drove Roth all over England—to Bath, Stonehenge, and Gloucestershire to have dinner with Mitchell’s parents—while Roth regaled him with a furious rant about his ghastly marriage. Mitchell would never again see his friend so vexed, though he noted that Roth, when young, remained hilarious and lovable even in anger (“a shining clever man”). By the end of the summer, indeed, Roth was in “recovery,” he wrote Solotaroff. “With goose flesh, and trepidation, I say I’m healing!”

  HE SHOULD HAVE STAYED in England. On September 18, he returned to New York and was welcomed home with a party given by Random House for their celebrated young author. Things went precipitously downhill from there. In Israel, Roth had made friends with the actor Michael “Mendy” Wager—married to Henry Fonda’s exwife, Susan, though mainly gay and even (as he confessed one night over the phone) in love with Roth—who arranged for Roth to sublet a friend’s third-floor walk-up on West Sixty-eighth Street near the park. The apartment’s owner was another gay actor whose walls were covered with autographed glossies; almost every night strangers would ring the doorbell downstairs, and Roth would wearily inform them via intercom that the owner was out of town. (“What about you, sweetheart?” one man inquired. “You sound kind of cute.”) It was in this two-room apartment that Roth heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot. After assuring his father that he himself was fine, Roth took a long walk around “spookily quiet” Manhattan, chatting now and then with other stunned pedestrians.

  While Roth had been abroad, his wife had boiled. “Where have I been?” she wrote in her journal. “Why haven’t I realized this? Philip doesn’t care for me—he’s sorry for me. It’s the plight of the poor grass widow and her children that has reached him—not me personally—my god! It seems so plain now, how have I mistaken this before? Is this a product of analysis? I wish I could go away. It’s so denigrating, I feel as though I haven’t been here for six years.” Galvanized by this bitter epiphany, Maggie brought action against Roth on June 4, charging him with abandonment and nonsupport, even though he’d been sending her the considerable sum of $100 a week plus monthly rent ($212.50) since his departure in March. In fact, against every conceivable sign to the contrary, Roth still hoped they could be reasonable about things—a view his first lawyer didn’t share. A “reality instructor” à la Himmelstein in Herzog (“Sonofabitch. They’ll put a meter on your nose, and charge you for breathing”), this man was represented as “Mr. Fuck Her Up the Ass Before She Fucks You” in a therapeutic playlet Roth wrote.† “Take all the money out of the bank,” the lawyer advises, “because if you don’t she will.”

  THE GUILTY DESERTER [crossed out; “Husband” scribbled above]: But I can’t. I promised her I would take care of her. She is hysterical. Maybe if I am nice to her now she will be nice to me later.

  MR. FUCK HER UP THE ASS: She’ll cut your balls off. She’ll rip them from your bleeding carcass and then jump on them with high-heeled shoes.

  ME [crossed out; “Mr. Blank” scribbled above]: No. She won’t. She isn’t that kind of woman. . . .

  MR. FUCK HER UP THE ASS: Horseshit. If I were her lawyer I would say, “Him? He must be worth a fortune. Pardon me Mrs. Blank, but my suggestion to you is take every penny the son of a bitch has got.”

  This man’s advice would prove prescient; nonetheless Roth sought more temperate counsel at Weil, Gotshal & Manges (recommended by Bennett Cerf), who charged him $1,500 within the first month or so.

  That summer he’d also shelled out $312.50 to send Helen to Camp Chateaugay—in the Adirondacks near the Canadian border—owned by a Smith College sociologist, Peter Rose, a friend of the Tumins. The day after Helen’s departure, Maggie traveled to another rental house in Wellfleet, even though its owner had been informed by Weil, Gotshal & Manges that the Roths had separated, and therefore the house should be rerented to another party. While the owner retained Roth’s $475 deposit, Maggie stayed the rest of the summer, entertaining the Styrons and sundry others, while reminding her husband’s Random House editor, Joe Fox, that she’d soon be submitting an outline for a satirical anthology they’d discussed, edited by her and including her husband’s work; Fox was also looking into the possibility of getting her a Random House job that would allow her to work from home—this in accord, Fox thought, with Roth’s own wishes.

  To Fox she didn’t mention that she’d alerted the sheriff, in Princeton, of her husband’s intentions to flee to Israel, Meyer Lansky–like, and thus evade his obligations to wife and daughter; hoping to detain him at the airport, she’d interrogated Kleinschmidt and others as to his itinerary, until the drama became part of the “Princeton scuttlebutt,” as Roth recalled, and the Tumins were able to warn him in time. “[T]his cunning Jew left three days before announced,” he wrote Solotaroff from London, “and saved his life, I suppose. I might have killed her [in the States]. Here I say loudly Fuck Her.” Maggie continued to take a wily approach with Joe Fox, advising the editor to spare Philip’s feelings—despite Fox’s misgivings about being less than “aboveboard”—and refrain from revealing that it was Fox himself who’d put her in touch with the top-gun matrimonial lawyer Vincent J. Malone, who was then representing Dr. James Murphy in his divorce from the future Happy Rockefeller. “The first error was to ask you about an attorney in the first place,” Maggie wrote Fox, quasi-contritely, “and I had no intention of speaking to you about it when I called; it was just that I was so upset and out of control, and how the hell does one find those guys anyway?”

  As Mr. Fuck Her Up the Ass had predicted, Maggie immediately moved to sequester Roth’s property in the State of New York, including their joint account at the Greenwich Savings Bank with a balance of $6,806.89. Mel Tumin invited Roth to hide his money by opening an account under Tumin’s name, and meanwhile Roth had managed to abscond with the balance of another joint account at the Bank of New York, which he deposited at the Israel Discount Bank (Tel Aviv branch). Thus he could go on paying for Helen’s psychotherapy, which he’d recommended in the first place, while also contributing to Ronald’s tuition at Morgan Park Academy. Around this time Maggie estimated for the court that she would henceforth require a monthly budget of $1,500—that is, $18,000 a year, or roughly $151,000 in 2020 dollars.

  Shortly after moving to the Warwick, Roth had informed his parents of the separation and arranged to meet Herman for lunch in New York. Though usually distressed by news of domestic discord, and certainly by the prospect of divorce, Herman seemed at peace with this particular case; he offered to loan his son money (refused) and bucked him up generally. Nor did he say a word, later, about a disturbing visit from Maggie at his Maple Shade office that summer, while Philip was in Israel. “That’s between you and my son,” said Herman, when she appeared unannounced and began berating him about Philip’s alleged failure to support her. “The little shakedown artist was here,” Herman remarked afterward to Sandy, who waited until Herman was dead to relate the episode to Philip. That summer, too, Maggie forged a letter on Philip’s Princeton stationery to gain access to his storage compartment at the Padded Wagon and remove some of the furniture. As for Roth’s collection of books and records, she steadily refused to return them until, a year or two later, she claimed they’d been destroyed in a fire.‡

  In August, an agitated Maggie phoned Roth in London. Without a word Helen had flown directly from camp (out of Montreal) to Chicago; now she was with her father and refused to return. Roth was also upset by the news and subsequently phoned Helen and calmly discussed the matter, thereby learning that Maggie hadn’t once visited her daughter at camp that summer, though Helen had repeatedly asked and Maggie was hardly burdened with responsibility otherwise. Meanwhile the girl’s great-aunt, Bea Walton, had offered to pay tuition at a boarding school in Kenosha, Kemper Hall, where the Waltons lived right across the street from campus. In her subsequent affidavit, Maggie represented her daughter’s abandonment as being the result of a surreptitious plot concocted by Roth and the girl’s therapist, Shirley Van Ferney.

  That winter Maggie moved to New York, where the divorce laws were congenial to her cause and she could supplement her alimony with a publishing job; soon she was working fifteen hours a week for her old employer, Harper & Row, and living on Sixtieth Street between Park and Lexington. Roth, in turn, parted company with Weil, Gotshal & Manges and hired the more affordable Shirley Fingerhood, whom he’d met a few years earlier when she was dating a friend of his, the cartoonist Jules Feiffer. With no-nonsense aplomb, Fingerhood dealt with the many creditors Maggie had left behind in Princeton, among them her psychiatrist, Dr. Guttman ($1,575), the Nassau-Conover Motor Company ($294.45), and the Cousins Liquor Company (unspecified), whose attorney Fingerhood reminded that “a husband is responsible only for debts incurred by his wife for necessaries and then only where he has not given her sufficient monies to pay for her own necessaries. . . . Accordingly, we do not have to come to the question as to whether or not liquor is a necessary.”

  While the court considered Maggie’s request for $18,000 a year plus $6,000 in counsel fees,§ Roth submitted an affidavit in which he revealed that his wife had not only tricked him into marriage, but had engaged in at least one well-known adulterous affair with a friend of theirs (who might have been Paul Fussell or various others, though Roth didn’t name names).

  Her recourse to falsehood and deceit as a means of having her way, regardless of the interests or integrity of others; her violent rages of a sort that finally so frightened her child that the child sought refuge elsewhere; her demanding and unrealistic attitudes of the very kind that lead her now to suggest $18,000 as a minimum amount with which she must be supported—all of these characteristics of hers made married life with her a nightmare.

  “My husband, Philip Roth, has attempted to portray himself as a simple naive soul who was tricked into a marriage which he did not seek and which I, portrayed as a woman of the world, desired,” Maggie replied, blithely scornful and unconstrained by the truth where it didn’t suit her. She flatly denied that she’d resorted to “subterfuge” in forcing Roth to marry her, alleging (falsely) that they’d been “engaged for two years”; as for his claim that she’d been unfaithful, she denied it “without equivocation” and pointed out that he himself had “shocked” their friends with his philandering, “even going so far as to make the abhorrent boast that as a result of his excesses”—that is, in London—“he suffered from prostatitis.” She appended the card from Alice Denham (“Chicken!”) as Exhibit A, along with Helen’s recent note to her from Kemper Hall (“My first week of school has gone very smootly althouth [sic] we have had a lot of school work”), by way of belying Roth’s claim that she and Helen were estranged. After due consideration, the court awarded Maggie $150 a week in temporary alimony and set a trial date for April 13, 1964, when Roth hoped to get that figure reduced, amid the “foul and filthy” business of airing malfeasances both real and fabricated.

  WALKED OUT ON THE PLATINUM! blared the headline on page 3 of the New York Daily News, accompanied by a photograph of the grim-faced blonde plaintiff, decked out in black. “Under questioning by her lawyer, Vincent J. Malone, the petite, attractive and 30ish Margaret estimated that her husband makes between $30,000 and $40,000 a year from his salary as English prof at Princeton, royalties from his two books, Goodby, Columbus [sic] and Getting On [sic!], and magazine writing.” Such testimony echoed Maggie’s earlier contention that Roth had had “two best-selling novels published by Random House,” although (as Roth subsequently countered) Goodbye, Columbus was in fact a story collection that hadn’t been published by Random House and was hardly a best seller. With such claims of Uris-like wealth, however, Maggie had enticed the high-powered Malone to take her on in the first place, and Roth remembered the man’s interest visibly waning when Roth, the defendant (“tall, dark and handsome as well as talented,” noted the Daily News), testified that his earning potential was never as great as advertised, and nowadays was decidedly on the downtick. The presiding judge, Samuel Coleman—a small, twinkly man of seventy or so, who seemed to be enjoying himself—asked Roth how much he got for a film script, since his wife had mentioned that Play Pix Productions wanted to make a movie of Letting Go for an exorbitant fee. Roth replied that Play Pix had offered an option in the amount of five thousand dollars but nothing had come of it; as for his own script writing, well, he didn’t actually write for the movies, so it was hard to say. “Tell me, Mr. Roth,” Coleman pursued, “how much would they pay you to write a film script?” “I don’t know, Your Honor.” “Guess.” “I suppose about twenty-five thousand dollars.” “And how much do you get paid by those magazines you write stories for?” “It depends on the magazine. If I publish a story in the Partisan Review, I make twenty-five dollars.” Here the judge’s playfulness was replaced by indignation: “You’re an intelligent young man. You teach at Princeton University. You’re a writer—don’t you want to succeed? Somebody offers you twenty-five dollars for what you write, somebody offers you twenty-five thousand dollars? Which do you choose?” Fingerhood gave her client a monitory look, but instead of staying calm and indulging the judge, Roth embarked on “a high-minded lecture on high art”—with the result that alimony remained fixed at $150 for the foreseeable future.

  BY THEN Roth was seeing Kleinschmidt four times a week at $27.50 a session; asked in later years how he’d benefited from analysis, Roth would reply, “It kept me from killing my first wife.” Lovingly, on Kleinschmidt’s couch, he would reprise his plan to buy a hunting knife at Hoffritz, on Madison Avenue, then wait in the shadows outside her apartment and stab her to death when she came out. Kleinschmidt would sigh: “Philip, you didn’t like the army that much. How will you enjoy prison?”

  One day, Roth was teaching Death in Venice to the twelve young men in his Princeton seminar when the door swung open and there was Maggie. “I have to talk to you,” she said. Roth joined her in the hallway and led her over to the third-floor stairwell. “You ever pull a trick like this again,” he said, “I’ll throw you down the fucking stairs.” Turning away, Roth noticed he’d failed to secure the door behind him; his students were staring down at their books. Roth returned to class and shut the door. “Death in Princeton,” he said.

  His old friend George Elliott from the Iowa Workshop, for one, implored Roth never again to speak to Maggie outside the presence of lawyers. “Poor lost soul, she needs, now, nothing so much as to be confirmed in her secret opinion of herself,” he wrote. “She forces everyone close to repudiate her, betray her, destroy her. . . . I fear there is only one possible relief for her torment now, death.” Meanwhile Maggie persisted in trying to arrange a private meeting with Roth. Shortly after the Princeton incident, she phoned to say she was willing to divorce him but needed to discuss it in person. Roth suggested she take it up with his lawyer, but she insisted: “Do you or don’t you want a divorce?” “Of course I do.” “Then let’s sit down together and talk about it.” Tantalized in spite of himself, Roth invited her over; a few minutes later she arrived, sat down, and calmly announced, “I’ll never divorce you.” Roth told her to get out, but she only kept repeating “I’ll never divorce you.” Finally he tried dragging her to the door, but she clung to the legs of the chair and began screaming “Let me go! Let me go!” He dropped her near the fireplace and grabbed a poker: “I’m going to bring this fucking thing down on your head,” he said—or so he told it in one version. Unlike a similar scene in My Life as a Man, however, he didn’t proceed to beat her with a poker or his hands, and she didn’t foul herself in the process. She either phoned her lawyer from Roth’s apartment (“Philip tried to beat me”), or simply threatened to and began weeping until, at last, she left. About an hour later Fingerhood called to say that Maggie’s lawyer was going to file an assault charge; she advised Roth to leave town for a few days.