Appearing as “May Aldridge” in The Facts, the elegant Mudge had attracted Roth in part because she, like Maggie, had seemed “intriguingly estranged from the very strata of American society of which they were each such distinctively emblazoned offspring.” Mudge’s father was a Pittsburgh steel executive who drank and didn’t like Jews, while the mother often reminded Ann and her sisters that men were only interested in their looks. Ann, whose debutante party was featured in Town & Country, had a horror of marrying a man like her father and spending the rest of her life at the Pittsburgh Golf Club. After drinking her way out of Bryn Mawr, she ended up at Silver Hill psychiatric hospital in Connecticut. Finally she moved to New York and took occasional work (mainly favors for friends) as an interior decorator; she was also in analysis, which is what she and Roth tended to discuss in the early days of their affair. On and off they’d be together almost five years, during which Roth never once went to Pittsburgh to meet her parents: “He was Jewish and he wrote dirty books,” said Mudge. “I don’t think it bothered him too much.”

  The couple had barely started when Roth blew town to spend most of that summer and part of the fall at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs—this on the recommendation of Cheever, to whom he’d explained he was about to be broke, what with the end of his Princeton job and nothing else in sight until his Ford Fellowship began on January 1, 1965. Also he desperately needed to be somewhere beyond Maggie’s reach, so work could again become the center of his life.† Yaddo would prove Roth’s salvation as a writer—a place of placid routine in a sylvan setting, among (mostly) congenial people. After a good night’s sleep in the Trask Mansion (no vicious drunken phone calls or any prospect thereof), followed by a quiet communal breakfast, Roth would grab his lunch pail and walk through the woods to his little studio, Hillside Cottage, whence other colonists would hear typing well after most of them had stopped for the day. Roth would break for lunch (his carrot, celery, and half his sandwich long gone) and join the Armenian musician Richard Hagopian at the swimming pool. Hagopian had recently been divorced by a woman who “shoved a red hot poker up his ass,” said Roth, “and let it cool there a while,” so they had plenty to talk about. Then Roth would work until four or so, take a walk into Saratoga and back, swim laps, play croquet, eat dinner, and return to his lonely but inviolate bed.

  There was plenty of swimming, croquet, tennis, and Ping-Pong, but Roth suspected the main sport (for him anyway) was masturbation. “Yaddo is a good place to work, not a bad place to live, and no place at all to carry with you your male part,” he reported to Mendy Wager. “But too much really is made of that thing anyway.” After a mostly celibate month or so, Roth and the others were joined by a new guest, Gladys Brooks, the seventy-seven-year-old widow of critic Van Wyck Brooks. “There is a very strong likelihood that I will try to go down on her at dinner,” Roth wrote Styron. And yet he rather begrudged the odd visit from his own beautiful girlfriend, Mudge, who spent a few weekends at a bed-and-breakfast in town and waited for Roth to phone her. They did all the things one does during summers in Saratoga: the strawberries and cream breakfast at the racetrack; the yearling sales in the big barn at night; a drink at the Spuyten Duyvil bar afterward. By Sunday afternoons, though, Roth would be almost beside himself: “You have to leave now! I have to work!” He compensated by writing her letters at least once a week, and for her birthday he sent a singing telegram.

  That first summer at Yaddo, Roth befriended Julius Goldstein, a bachelor painter fifteen years his senior, who taught part-time at Hunter College and lived most of the year in a cramped garret in the Village. Goldstein was a witty fellow who shared Roth’s enthusiasm for women and baseball. He’d had an affair with the poet Delmore Schwartz’s first wife, Gertrude Buckman (whom Roth would later hire as a London tour guide for Bess and Herman), and liked to reminisce about his days on a Manhattan sandlot team, the Yorkville Arrows. He called the southpaw Roth “Lefty,” and after reading one of Roth’s new books, he’d always preface his remarks with “Well, you put another one over on the public, Lefty.” Goldstein was, in fact, a deeply melancholy man whose talk often reverted to the tragedy of his father’s death while he was still in utero, and even his lighter moods were tinged with a kind of quibbling sarcasm. One of Roth’s later girlfriends, who loved Goldstein, dubbed him Uncle Julio Negativo, and made a point of inviting the lonely man to their house as often as the couple could reasonably bear it.

  Another important friendship that summer was with the novelist Alison Lurie, who was married to the critic Jonathan Bishop;‡ she and Roth formed an attachment based on mutual literary encouragement. Both had published a single novel and wondered whether they would ever publish another. Roth admired Lurie’s work and told her she could be the “next mean female novelist after Mary McCarthy,” whereas Lurie was so vital to Roth’s progress on his second novel that she’d be numbered among the diverse group of post-Maggie supporters to whom When She Was Good is dedicated.§ Over the next two years Lurie would critique draft after draft of the book Roth had begun soon after finishing Letting Go—that is, around the time he’d committed his imagination to exploring non-Jewish themes and hence was trying to make fiction out of Maggie’s stories about her desperate youth in South Haven, the daughter of the town drunk. “[Philip] has begun a new story about me,” Maggie wrote in her journal on December 28, 1961 (a couple of weeks before Alice Denham’s card arrived and Maggie confessed to the urine fraud). “That is, a woman like me with a terrified boy like [Ronald] married to a monster like [Burt]. He’s very involved and excited about it. And I am excited too to see how it will work out.” The original title was The Goyim, no less, with an epigraph supplied by Helen: “When a Jew says goy, what is he thinking?” The novel about the grim world of Liberty Center was meant to give an answer to that question, or rather to expose certain truths underlying the usual Jewish stereotypes of gentile life, but Roth had given up on the manuscript “after 200 pages and much sweat.”

  For a decade or so—beginning with that awful day in January 1962 (“Chicken!”)—Roth would be fixated on finding the right narrative vehicle for the urine episode; during the summer of 1962, while separated from Maggie that first time, he’d tried using it in his play 1957: The Taming of the Id, and also had it in mind for The Goyim—but when he revisited the latter, after letting some marital smoke clear, it read “like the work of a lunatic.” At Yaddo, then, he’d dismally resigned himself to working on his one-act farces as well as a new version of Taming of the Id, but “on a chance” he’d also packed his discarded novel about Liberty Center, now titled Time Away. “Suddenly I saw where it was wrong and where it was right,” he wrote Baker at the end of 1964, “and late in June started in on it again, working almost every day until the middle of October when I had six chapters of a new draft—that is, the whole book—and four of those chapters rewritten into a nearly final draft.” All this in the quiet woods of Saratoga, where he was able to rediscover “good habits of patience” and even something of his old self-confidence.

  “Philip, there will always be a bed for you here,” said the seventy-nine-year-old director of Yaddo, Elizabeth Ames, when Roth departed in October. A genteel person averse to suffering fools (with whom she was apt to exaggerate her already well-advanced deafness), Ames regarded the handsome, industrious Roth as an “ideal guest,” and often made a point of inviting him to tea and sitting beside him at the dinner table. “She was one of those strong, independent, highly competent, intelligent, somewhat reserved, childless women on the order of Mildred Martin who I’d always liked,” said Roth, who dedicated The Breast as follows: “To ELIZABETH AMES, executive director of Yaddo from 1924 to 1970 and to THE CORPORATION OF YADDO, Saratoga Springs, New York, the best friends a writer could have.”

  PHONE CALLS AT YADDO were fielded by a secretary in the Trask Mansion, and messages were left on a hall table at the end of the day, whereupon they could be returned or ignored as a guest saw fit. Perhaps the last call Roth ever returned to Maggie was sometime in July, during which he mentioned that he needed her to sign a joint tax return that would save him a thousand dollars. “The fucking cocksucking bitch” (as he described her in a subsequent letter to Baker) refused to do so unless Roth agreed to pay the thousand directly to her; rather than comply, Roth decided to “steadily and patiently go broke” between then and January, when he’d return to court and request a reduction of alimony.

  Meanwhile he continued to phone Helen in Kenosha every other week, and also sent her a set of monogrammed stationery to encourage her to write. “I want to tank you [sic] so much for the check it will and has gawn to good use,” she obliged him, signing her letters, “I miss you and love you very much.” That summer Roth had driven her to Camp Chateaugay before heading down to Yaddo—a trip Helen remembered as a little nervous-making given her driver’s tendency to lapse into long brooding silences. “You’re only boring when you ask me if you’re boring me,” he assured her, sweetly, and a month later he paid her a visit and was delighted to find her thriving: “Too much to go into here,” he wrote Baker afterward, “except to say that she is (for all her fucked-up grades in school) in love with the most intelligent boy in the camp, and reading Kafka, and very intense Joan Baez, and understands Maggie very very well; it took me years to get where she is now, and she’s thirteen.”

  On September 2—a few days before Helen returned to school—Roth drove to the city and took her to a Broadway play (her first), an Actors’ Studio production of Three Sisters, preceded by dinner at Sardi’s. Helen remembered how her mother had lent her a pretty blue dress for the evening, and asked a lot of questions beforehand about where they were going and so forth. At the theater Helen and Roth had just settled into their seats—down front on the aisle (Mendy Wager had gotten them the tickets)—when Roth noticed a genial man with a mustache standing over them: “Mr. Philip Roth?” he inquired, and when Roth nodded the man produced a summons from his inside coat pocket. During intermission Roth left Helen in the lobby with an orange drink and pored over the papers in a toilet stall. “I am really sorry about the upset with the summons,” Fingerhood wrote him a week later. “However, that is evidently our friend’s way of saying that the offer of settlement which was discussed is unacceptable.” Fingerhood made it clear that Maggie’s lawyer could as easily have sent the papers directly to her—“but then,” Roth noted, “of course the drama and the harassment would have gone out of it.”

  Roth’s final weeks at Yaddo were blighted by two unanswered phone calls from Maggie (“both angry, I am told”), followed by a letter in which she bitterly informed him that her father had been killed the previous weekend but she couldn’t go to the funeral because Roth was six weeks behind in alimony. “It happens I am one week ahead,” he wrote Lurie, “but the pattern of accusation was so familiar, and the hallucinations, etc. . . . that I haven’t been able to come up from under. My head has been pounding for a week; it feels stuffed; and my neck is like stone.” Work, as ever, was the sovereign anodyne. Another artifact from his recent visit to Maggie’s apartment (after her latest suicide attempt) was a packet of ten-year-old prison letters from Maggie’s father to her mother. Roth appropriated a “collage” of quotes for Whitey’s sorrowful Valentine’s Day letter at the end of When She Was Good—the letter found frozen to the cheek of Lucy Nelson’s corpse. “To put it bluntly,” he wrote of Lucy’s real-life model, “I wish she were dead.”

  * A reputation that was unmade, to some extent, by the less creditable biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon that followed.

  † Roth was dejected to learn that the Ford Foundation couldn’t accommodate his request for a residency as far afield as the Alley Theatre in Houston.

  ‡ Son of the poet John Peale Bishop, who was perhaps best known for his friendships with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson.

  § The book’s dedication: “To my brother Sandy; to my friends Alison Bishop, Bob Brustein, George Elliott, Mary Emma Elliott, Howard Stein, and Mel Tumin; and to Ann Mudge: For words spoken and deeds done.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-One

  AFTER RETURNING FROM YADDO, ROTH MOVED INTO A pleasant second-floor apartment at 9 East Tenth Street, between Fifth and University. Mudge fixed the place up with secondhand furniture she bought at auctions and flea markets on Roth’s “pathetic budget,” and Roth put off getting a phone as long as possible (he finally allowed himself one with an unlisted number). Determined to avoid the distractions of a busy social life, he was nonetheless within a couple of blocks of his good friends the Schneiders and Julius Goldstein. Roth found a homey, inexpensive Italian restaurant on Houston, Ballato’s, where he ate two or three times a week either alone or with Goldstein and one or two others. As Goldstein grumbled to a mutual friend, he always ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and Roth the most expensive; then, when the check arrived, Roth would say, “Let’s split it.”

  In January, Roth reluctantly deferred work on his novel to write plays and watch rehearsals at St. Clement’s Church, where the American Place Theatre was located. That year’s best production by far was Robert Lowell’s The Old Glory, a trilogy of one-act adaptations of two Hawthorne stories as well as (“the stellar piece”) Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” with Frank Langella as Cereno and Roscoe Lee Browne as Babo, the leader of the slave rebellion. Lowell was more than a little manic during rehearsals, and Roth distanced himself when the poet obsessively insisted on showing him snapshots of a young Indian woman he was smitten with.

  While Roth moonlighted as a playwright, his friend Bob Silvers made him the New York Review of Books’ “hatchet man in the theater,” as Roth put it—at any rate he wrote two long reviews in nine months that were memorable for their provocative disregard of whatever passed for political correctness in those days. Roth’s pleasant acquaintance with James Baldwin may have suffered as a result of his assessment of Blues for Mister Charlie:

  It is soap opera designed to illustrate the superiority of black over whites. . . . They dance better. And they cook better. And their penises are longer, or stiffer. Indeed, so much that comprises the Southern stereotype of the Negro comes back through Negro mouths as testimony to their human superiority, that finally one is about ready to hear that the eating of watermelon increases one’s word power.

  The other play under review in Roth’s first piece (“Channel X: Two Plays on the Race Conflict”) was LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman, about a white woman, Lula, who tauntingly flirts with a black man, Clay, on the subway, and finally stabs him in the heart. In the course of suggesting that the ending is gratuitous—not to say illogical, given the characters’ behavior elsewhere in the play—Roth asserted that Clay “is really not Negro enough for us to be told that it is for his being a Negro that he is murdered,” and also said hard things about the play’s “literary pretension” and “false profundity.”

  For a white reviewer (a “writer-in-residence at Princeton,” no less, as Roth still identified himself when the piece ran) to suggest that an educated, well-mannered black character conceived by a militant black playwright is “not Negro enough” was rash, even in May 1964, whatever the cogency of Roth’s argument otherwise. “Sir, it is not my fault that you are so feebleminded you refuse to see any Negro as a man, but rather as the narrow product of your own sterile response,” LeRoi Jones’s indignant letter to the New York Review began.

  You can not categorize men. If my character is, as you say, “not Negro enough . . .”, then that would mean you have a “definition” of what Negroes are.

  The main rot in the minds of “academic” liberals like yourself, is that you take your own distortion of the world to be somehow more profound than the cracker’s. There is little difference except you guys have hipper cover stories . . . A writer-in-residence, indeed!

  Roth’s reply was unlikely to lead to cordial feelings between the two Newark writers. He reiterated that Clay (“the Negro character whom I discussed in more than the three words you choose to quote”) was inconsistent as written—modest and polite in the first scene, “violently disposed” in the second. He continued:

  Though charity might lead me to suggest that some clumsiness in my review caused you to misconstrue my meaning, the rhetoric and reasoning of your letter are sufficient to overwhelm any great flow of generous feelings in me. But then you would make it especially hard for anyone, I think, to trust very far your powers of analysis, literary or otherwise, when you warn emphatically in the first paragraph, “You can not categorize men,” only to rush on in a second to speak of “the main rot in the minds of ‘academic’ liberals like yourself.”

  “I hope to do for the fags this time what I did for the colored last,” Roth quipped about his second review, in February 1965, of Albee’s Tiny Alice. Despite his close friendships with gay men (especially later), Roth could be amazingly tasteless even by the norms of the era; with respect to Tiny Alice, however, he couldn’t abide the “galling sophistication” and “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of what was evidently meant to be an all but impenetrable allegory of gay life. “How long before a play is produced on Broadway in which the homosexual hero is presented as a homosexual,” Roth wrote, “and not disguised as an angst-ridden priest, or an angry Negro”—another dig at LeRoi Jones—“or an aging actress; or worst of all, Everyman?” One reader, Morris Belsnick, subsequently wrote to the editor wondering why Roth had assumed the play’s homosexual meaning was “a dirty little secret which Albee cannot face” since, after all, the very title of the play was a well-known gay expression for “a masculine derriere.” Roth replied: “If Mr. Belsnick is right about the homosexual argot, and if the pun was intentional, then the play is even worse than I thought it was.”