Further in keeping with how George Elliott had envisaged things, Maggie promptly tried to kill herself again, or at least to take enough pills to make it seem that way. (She later told a friend and coworker that she’d “made sure somebody would find her.”) Roth was lying low in Bradley Beach when he got the news from Fingerhood, whereupon he packed his things and paid his wife a visit at Roosevelt Hospital (“I cannot fathom my motive for doing so”). To the best of his recollection, when she came to, he actually said to her à la Peter Tarnopol, “You are in Hell,” and she faintly replied, “Oh, delicious, if you’re here too.”

  She wanted a few toilet articles from her apartment, and Roth volunteered to get them. A cop was posted at the door, which had been broken in the act of forcing it open; Roth identified himself and was allowed to enter. Again like Tarnopol, he found two intriguing items in the bedside table: a long-handled can opener he presumed was used for masturbation, and a light blue spiral notebook, her journal, that he hoped would contain evidence of the urine fraud. However, he found only the one allusion about “confessing to Philip” (mentioned above); as for the rest of it, he would reproduce several entries almost verbatim in My Life as a Man; in life as in art, he was puzzled and even a little stung by the journal’s banality: “about as interesting on the subject of a woman’s life as Dixie Dugan. . . . In one so cunning, how bizarre!”¶ As for the can opener, Roth kept it for a long time and later claimed (facetiously) to have considered giving it to his archive at the Library of Congress.

  * By his own account, Roth misremembered this encounter in The Facts as having occurred during a subsequent trip to London, in 1968.

  † In an interview with his biographer, Roth suggested the playlet was highly autobiographical.

  ‡ At this point it goes without saying, perhaps, that she either appropriated or sold whatever she could of her husband’s belongings. For $500 in 2020 one could buy a copy of Starbuck’s Bone Thoughts (1960), via Amazon, inscribed “To Phil and Maggie, who said just the best thing about it. / George.”

  § A total amount almost equal to Roth’s gross 1963 income of $25,064.99—one of his best earning years ever, given the confluence of royalty earnings for Letting Go with Princeton income. Over the next three years (until he signed his next book contract), his earnings would steadily decline until they were almost half his early-1960s peak.

  ¶ In most cases I’ve tried to cull only the most telling, pertinent, and perceptive passages in Maggie’s journal, and hence may have inadvertently misrepresented the basic tenor of what is, indeed, a pretty insipid piece of writing.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty

  SHORTLY AFTER HE RETURNED FROM LONDON, ROTH struck up a friendship with the theater critic and Columbia professor Robert (Bob) Brustein and his wife, Norma, an actress, and soon fell into a routine of eating dinner almost weekly at their stately apartment on East Eighty-fifth. “You two bailed me out of a lot of loneliness,” he wrote Bob many years later, remembering how the couple would patiently listen into the wee hours while Roth fulminated over his wife’s iniquities. Roth was a few years younger than the couple—a “loony” little brother, said Bob, who could be counted on for laughs whatever his mood otherwise. Roth, in turn, was so dependent on sanctuary chez Brustein that he even showed up for a dinner party that had been scheduled—and tacitly canceled—on the night of the great blackout of 1965: “He arrived just on time,” Brustein recalled, “having solved the dead subway problem by walking up two miles of dark streets and the dead elevator problem by walking up eight flights of stairs.”

  Through Brustein he met another funny Jewish guy, Albert Goldman, one of Brustein’s Columbia colleagues, who’d recently begun reviewing pop music for Life. Brustein had met Goldman in a graduate seminar taught by Lionel Trilling; a besuited dandy with carefully oiled hair, Goldman delivered a paper on Beethoven’s last quartets that left Trilling and the others rather stunned by its brilliant-seeming abstruseness. Outside of class, however, Goldman “turned into this completely other guy,” said Brustein. Cackling, Goldman told his fellow grad students that he supported himself by selling shingling jobs door to door—that is, by absconding with his customers’ down payments for purely speculative services. He and Roth had come from the kind of Jewish families that nurture neuroses and comic brio, and would shout over each other at the Brustein dinner table while other guests poured onto the floor laughing. Explaining a hand tremor, Goldman said his mother used to make him pick his father’s pocket. Sometimes, too, he would seem to hear this same woman’s voice (though she lived in Santa Monica) while eating his morning egg at Mayhew’s, a diner in the East Sixties: “Albert, your father and I have been worried sick about you!” Goldman would look up and see Roth “glaring at [him] maniacally”: “Two weeks and not a word. How is it a writer, a person who sits all day behind a typewriter, can’t put two words together to send to a mother who lives three thousand miles away?”

  Ten years later Goldman would make his reputation with a brilliant biography, Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!!,* and meanwhile he also shared his interest in rock ’n’ roll with Roth, taking him along for concerts by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Fugs. One night, soon after Portnoy was published, he took Roth backstage at Madison Square Garden for an interview with B. B. King; Roth chatted a while before leaving to claim their seats, and, as Goldman told him afterward, King looked around at his entourage, rubbed Roth’s seat, and said, “That guy just made a million dollars from writin’ a book.”

  Through his friendships with like-minded Jews, Roth rediscovered something that the scourge of Maggie had almost made him forget: he was a funny guy. With Goldman he discussed a Genet-like play he wanted to write, The Terrace, about a brothel for nice Jewish boys: a motherly whore would bathe and powder you, then put you in Dr. Denton kiddie pajamas and tuck you into bed, where you’d fall asleep listening to “a little radio with an orange dial.” The next morning a soft voice would call, “Wake up, dear, it’s time to get up.” For that, said Roth, he’d gladly pay fifty bucks a night. Another venue for such monologues was the Hotel des Artistes apartment of the Epsteins, Jason and Barbara—he an editor at Random House, she an editor at The New York Review of Books. Either solo or in tandem with the equally zany Jules Feiffer, Roth would sing and sing for his supper, riffing on Shakespeare and/or the dangers of answering a doorbell in New York. More and more, too, Roth was indulging in the pleasures of “reckless narrative disclosure” that he’d discovered on Kleinschmidt’s couch. One day, with Brustein and Feiffer, he was standing in the water at Lambert’s Cove Beach on Martha’s Vineyard, when, apropos of nothing, he began holding forth on the subject of masturbation. “It was truly gut-breaking, funny and shocking,” recalled Feiffer, who almost drowned laughing. As for Brustein and his wife, their copy of Portnoy would be aptly inscribed, “To Bob and Norma, who encourage me in this madness.”

  Roth began tentatively mining this vein in his work, despite his post-Yeshiva vow never to write about Jews again. In early 1963 he started work on a madcap fantasy titled The Last Jew or The Jewboy, which he described to Bob Baker as “very promising, and very funny, and highly invented, and therein—the invention—lies the problem. How much is too much, etc?” That indeed was the question. The titular Jewboy is an orphan named Heshie who’s left in a shoe box at a Jewish old-age home, where he’s summarily circumcised by an ancient mohel. Over the next two hundred pages or so, Heshie is adopted by every manner of Jewish parent, including various mothers, a milkman, and a rich gangster, Taback, who teaches him that good rye bread is better than cake, and startles the boy by offering him shrimp. “What am I, Chinese?” says Taback, when Heshie mentions that he is, after all, a Jew. “Don’t you have a good time with me?”

  “Life,” said Heshie, “life—”

  “What about life?”

  “It isn’t just good times,” the boy finally got out.

  “Oh no? What else is it?”

  By the end, the boy seems about to embrace Taback’s philosophy, lighting out on skates across a frozen Newark lake in pursuit of a shiksa called Thereal McCoy. “Don’t!” one of his stepfathers calls after him. “You’re skating on thin ice!” Heedlessly speeding ahead, Heshie replies, “Oh, you dope, Daddy, that’s only an expression,” as the ice begins cracking around him.

  “You are a very funny Jew,” Joe Fox wrote Roth of The Jewboy, confessing however that he found the surrealism puzzling in parts. “Why Jesus and Mary?” he inquired of a digressive bit of shtick updating the Christmas story; in Roth’s version, the innkeeper calls the cops on Joseph, who’s startled when the police captain challenges him to compare testicles: “I’ll bet you anything you want that for sheer hang and weight, the average Gentile has got balls on him that run from one and a half to two times larger than the average Jew.” Roth marked this section with a folding tab of paper labeled “BALLS” (he would, in fact, find use for it later), and put the rest of the manuscript aside forever, give or take the odd detail. As he later explained, The Jewboy “tended to cover with a patina of wacky inventiveness material quite interesting in itself and, as in certain types of dreams and folktales, intimated much more than I knew how to confront head-on in a fiction.”

  In the two-plus years since Letting Go, he’d managed to complete a total of three stories for publication, and the most recent two were neither funny nor inventive. Moreover he wasn’t writing about Jews, at least publicly, unless you count the offstage analyst Spielvogel, about whom Roth was considering a series of stories: “Like the York cycle of mystery plays,” he said, “a lot of people would have this doctor, but you’d never see him.” Spielvogel would, of course, emerge as the silent auditor of Alex Portnoy, but meanwhile he was mercifully dropped after a single bad story—“real shit,” said Roth—that appeared in the November 1963 Esquire, “The Psychoanalytic Special.” Inspired by Roth’s mooning over the loss of Lucy Warner while riding a thrice-weekly train from Princeton to see Kleinschmidt, the story gives us the maundering thoughts of Ella Wittig, as she too mourns the loss of a lover, Perry, while stuck with a merely dull husband, Michael. That adultery can make a bad marriage bearable was a theme Roth would revisit more memorably throughout his life and work; as for “The Psychoanalytic Special,” it deserves a decent burial amid the microfilm holdings.

  The same may be said more emphatically of “An Actor’s Life for Me,” about another unhappy married couple, Juliet and Walter Appel, who comfort themselves with delusions of artistic talent. Playboy, perhaps, was paying Roth by the word—certainly he needed the money—which might explain why this static idea is belabored at such eerie length: eleven fine-print, multicolumn pages. Juliet despairs of acting and tries her hand at playwriting, whereas Walter despairs of playwriting and takes a job “in the business end of the theater”; thus Juliet affects to work on her play each night, while Walter notices (and notices and notices) a naked man peeping at her from an opposite window. “He should have forced her to have a child long ago,” Walter reflects, but doesn’t act until an umpteenth sighting of the naked man causes both of them to realize, at long last, that they might as well resign themselves to a more mundane, nonartistic domesticity: “he mounted Juliet,” the story ends, “[and] proceeded to reproduce himself.”

  The witty prodigy who wrote the stories in Goodbye, Columbus had lost his way, and was himself pondering an alternative career as a playwright. Encouraged by Brustein and Howard Stein, Roth applied for a one-year Ford Foundation program intended to bring “established writers in nondramatic forms into formal association with the theater and . . . ultimately to improve the quality of plays and scripts available to American directors, actors and producers.” Winning the fellowship was a foregone conclusion for one of the best fiction writers of his generation, though Roth was disgruntled when the foundation saw fit to reduce his grant to $7,500 because of his separation from Maggie, cutting the $1,500 spouse allowance that would have covered all of ten weeks of alimony. Nor was he thrilled at the prospect of being “in residence” at the American Place Theatre on West Forty-sixth, as the fellowship required, the better for him to learn “stage problems and the requirements of dramatic writing” by watching other people’s plays. “It don’t sound like fun,” Roth morosely wrote Baker; “and if something else turns up I may wind up telling them to shove it.”

  But nothing much did, so Roth again turned to playwriting. His first efforts were one-act farces in the fanciful mode of The Jewboy. The Fishwife takes place in “the near future,” and reflects Roth’s obsessive skepticism toward marriage. The middle-aged Howard is dismayed when his young wife, Gloria, announces she is taking a second husband in keeping with their brave new world of legalized polygamy. Because neither spouse can entirely requite the needs of the other, Gloria is affianced to a tango instructor while Howard admits he’s been secretly seeing a slatternly woman who shares his love of fish (Howard abhors tango dancing, Gloria fish). “Enough guilt,” he proclaims in the end. “Enough hating of our own authentic selves. . . . I see life stripped of the sham and the sanctimony, of the deceit and the hypocrisy, of all the poison and the ugliness—the smallness.” When Gloria takes him at his word, however, and mentions the prospect of a third husband, Howard is shocked and dismayed all over again.

  Roth’s other farce, Buried Again, was “longer and more interesting” than The Fishwife, or so Roth thought at the time. A dead Jewish man, Weingast, appears before a reincarnation panel—four vaguely sinister types, including a woman with “a heavy Germanic accent” (Roth had Hannah Arendt in mind) and a bland goyish “Chairman” (Eisenhower)—who offer to return Weingast to earth as a gentile. Amid steadily increasing rancor on both sides, Weingast insists he wants nothing better than to resume his quiet life as a New Jersey Jew, until the panel flatly asserts that “mankind has had enough of Jews.” “Goys!” Weingast erupts. “You goy bastards!”—whereupon the panelists rise and begin banging gongs behind them, a gathering clamor that culminates in “a long horrible loud unmusical sound, a little longer than is bearable.” The end. Looking back over the decades at such efforts as Buried Again and The Fishwife, Roth decided that “nobody has ever written worse plays than me.” Pause. “Maybe Henry James.”

  CHEEVER AND ROTH had kept occasionally in touch since the Esquire symposium a few years back, and in February 1964 Roth took a train to Ossining to spend a weekend with Cheever’s family. Cheever recorded some impressions in his journal:

  Young, supple, gifted, intelligent, he has the young man’s air of regarding most things as if they generated an intolerable heat. I don’t mean fastidiousness, but he holds his head back from his plate of roast beef as if it were a conflagration. He is divorced from a girl I thought delectable. “She won’t even give me back my ice skates.” The conversation hews to a sexual line—cock and balls, Genet, Rechy—but he speaks, I think, with grace, subtlety, wit.

  A month or so later, after the National Book Award ceremony, the Cheevers invited Roth to join them for dinner at Sardi’s, where they also brought an attractive young woman who was herself a promising writer. The two young people liked each other and slept together once or twice—then Roth, as was his wont, disappeared. “Mr. Philip Roth / Institute for Unpredictable Behavior / Next to Edward Albie [sic]” the woman subsequently addressed a letter written in the form of a research questionnaire: “1) What happened? 2) Where are we? . . .” She was more bewildered than offended: Roth had seemed sweet-natured and funny, hardly a cad, but he reared away from romantic attachment as if it were a conflagration (as Cheever would have it).

  A more sustained effort would follow with Ann Mudge, a socialite from Pittsburgh who’d been featured that January in the fashion section of the Times as one of four Junior Committee members who would model Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry at the Plaza’s annual Diamond Ball; the other women included the late Gary Cooper’s daughter, Maria, and the former Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Mrs. Howard Oxenberg, who was furious that the Times had used Mudge for “the Bitch of the Week picture,” as Mudge put it in 2012 (remarking that Mrs. Oxenberg’s royal title “and a couple of bucks will get you a cup of coffee”). That spring Mudge and Roth became acquainted at a dinner party given by Bennett Cerf and his wife, where Roth had kept the table amused with his well-polished patter about the spouse who wouldn’t give him back his ice skates. In fact he and Mudge had met in passing some five years before, when Roth and Maggie had been among a group of partygoers chez Plimpton who’d adjourned to the Vietnamese Lantern for dinner. Mudge had sat next to Bob Silvers, who told her in a low voice who the others were: “That’s Philip Roth. He’s going to be a very good writer, but he’s with that woman and she’s going to ruin his life. She’s crazy.”