Roth felt the same way, and was even willing to say so to Lelchuk: “Happy note,” he wrote in July. “The chow at Broadview has become first-rate. I have a sore on my cock, so the fucking has fallen off, but lately we have had some delicious little meals; if I train one more girl I get to retire, or so Kleinschmidt says . . . but I may really be working a gem into shape for the next guy. When will I be the next guy?” Roth had become more and more impressed by Sproul’s “tremendous competence,” and indeed was a little helpless without her. One day she suddenly had to return to Manhattan, where she got a call from Roth: at the butcher he’d begun to ask for a piece of liver, but caught himself in the nick of time (lest the news spread that Portnoy was at it again) and asked for lamb chops instead; but how does one cook lamb chops, he inquired (“one is tempted to add ‘sheepishly,’ ” Sproul remarked). Not least, hers was the voice of sweet, persistent reason. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, walking along a mountain road while he complained yet again about the morbidities of fame. “No one cares, and up here no one has any idea who you are!” Just then they heard a lone car approaching, and moved to the side of the road while the car pulled up and a woman leaned out the passenger window: “It’s Portnoy!”

  Soon he made friends with a fellow artist in a similar predicament, the painter Philip Guston, who lived about a mile away at the Maverick Art Colony. Guston had become famous as a leading member of the New York School of abstract expressionists—until the midsixties, when he’d shocked the art world by disavowing his own work. “American abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover-up for a poverty of spirit,” he wrote. Furious about the Vietnam War and other aspects of American life, Guston no longer saw the point of sublimating his anger by “adjust[ing] a red to a blue”; instead he began to paint lightbulbs, old shoes, and cartoonish Klansmen smoking fat cigars. He’d moved to Woodstock in 1967, the better to pursue his muse in relative isolation, and would become even more reclusive after a showing of his new work at the Marlborough Gallery, in 1970, was savagely panned by Hilton Kramer in the Times, under the headline A MANDARIN PRETENDING TO BE A STUMBLEBUM.

  Roth’s and Guston’s parallel courses over the next few years were the result of a fascinating symbiosis—a friendship whereby two of the most eminent figures in their respective fields lived in the remote countryside, “hiding themselves away from almost everything but their work and each other,” as Roth put it. Guston was a burly Canadian Jew who—quite like Roth himself—could be loud and flamboyant among friends, but was easily wounded and prone to hibernation. In Woodstock, he liked cooking big batches of pasta for Roth and the odd other, or else the two would meet for lunch at the Aim to Please Diner in nearby Kingston, where Guston liked to filch sugar canisters and other specimens of “crapola”—objective correlatives for public discourse in the age of Richard Nixon, whom both men devotedly loathed. Early chapters of Roth’s Our Gang inspired the painter to produce a spate of Nixon cartoons in which the president’s nose appears to be a phallus, elongating with each fresh lie. His Nixon series would eventually be collected in a book, Poor Richard, and for Roth’s fortieth birthday he drew a stylized portrait (“Happy birthday to Philip Roth from Key Biscayne”) of Nixon and his cronies, half submerged in the sea: Henry Kissinger is a pair of synecdochic horn-rims and Spiro Agnew an enormous nose attached to a pinhead.

  Roth’s main impression of Guston was one of “terrible loneliness”—a gregarious man who’d turned his back on the world. Sharing Guston’s isolation was a wife, Musa, his physical and temperamental opposite: a slight, frail-seeming, silent woman, she’d been raised by Protestant missionaries in Central America and loved to walk in the woods looking for nests and fossils and such. She was outside an open window, gardening, when Guston showed Roth around their house for the first time and came to their enormous marital bed: “This bed is so big,” Guston said, “I can’t even find Musa in it.” An acerbic voice floated through the window: “Why don’t you look?” “That’s where I got the idea of the sex life of the Lonoffs,” said Roth, debunking the assumption that the reclusive E. I. Lonoff and his wife, in The Ghost Writer, were entirely based on the Malamuds.‡ As Roth pointed out, Hope Lonoff is a brittle Yankee like Musa, not an Italian from Brooklyn like Ann Malamud; as for Lonoff’s backstory, it was mostly derived from the life of Philip Rahv, who’d left his Ukrainian mother in Palestine while he reinvented himself in New England. The person Lonoff most resembled, however, was Roth himself—or what Roth thought he might have become if he’d stayed in the country and married Sproul, who would have insisted on a family while Roth, for his part, wrote alone in his room, “day in, day out, year in, year out.”

  ALL THAT LONG YEAR, Roth worked frantically on what would someday become, after many mutations and thousands of pages, My Life as a Man. “It’s as if you’d written her out of your life,” said Vernon Gibberd the previous summer, in England, a couple of months after Maggie’s violent death; later Gibberd would come to believe that Maggie, whatever her trespasses, had paid a high posthumous price in the form of her vile characterization in Roth’s 1974 novel. One may argue, however—as Roth himself did—that revenge ran very much the other way, given how obsessively, joylessly, and often hopelessly he toiled over one of his most autobiographical and least popular books. The main aesthetic difficulty was improving on the known facts. In one of his ur-versions, the narrator remembers his first attempt to grapple with the material—to wit, a “strident failure of a play” that he’d consigned to a file folder labeled “Shit” after hearing actors read it aloud: “I wasn’t making a play, I was making an indictment and a cry for help—exposing Roberta’s crime to the world, which would then issue its verdict: Boy Innocent, Bitch Guilty! This is writing?” And yet his attempts at making novels (versus plays) of the urine-fraud story tended to develop along precisely the same lines, and his often bizarre attempts to take a fresh approach almost always led to a dead end. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m up to,” he wrote Solotaroff on April 21, 1969, and the following month he confessed to his British publisher, Tom Maschler, that his work in progress was producing “a strong desire in me to slit my throat.”

  Poor writing made Roth poor company, and he observed that Sproul was beginning to keep her distance—retiring after dinner to sit alone and ponder her studies. “Nothing between us now but sex,” he noted that October. “The very reverse of affair with A[nn]—there, had a full life, but no sex.” Then in January he received an open-ended assignment from McCall’s to write a piece about Southeast Asia (“I think I’m supposed to bring back some recipes from Cambodia and household tips from Taiwan,” he wrote Jacquie Rogers). Certainly he had nothing better to do, and Sproul was happy to assist any project that would take Roth out of his head for a while. She arranged every detail including round-the-world tickets on Pan Am—this despite Roth’s fear of flying, which, he found, had dissipated now that Maggie was ashes.

  They departed on February 24, 1970, stopping in Athens to visit Roth’s old Princeton friends Mike and Mary Keeley; the highlight of a delightful four days was a visit to the ancient theater at Delphi, where Mike declaimed Aeschylus in the original Greek, and Roth recited his lines as the Shepherd in the Bucknell production of Oedipus Rex. In Thailand, Roth promised an interview to the English-language Bangkok Post in exchange for a guided tour of the city. Their reporter (“Some self-styled Lord Jim with a tin ear,” as Roth later described him with some injustice) took them to a kickboxing match attended by an unruly pack of GIs on leave. “After declining to take a bow,” Time reported on its “People” page, “Novelist Philip Roth could not resist a dig at a bestselling rival: ‘Now if I were Norman Mailer . . . I’d be up in the ring after the first bout, kicking away at the boxers in golf shoes.’ ” This, of course, sounds exactly like Roth in a waggish mood, though in a mortified letter to Mailer he blamed the Post reporter for such a “callow statement.” “At least they called me your best selling rival,” Mailer benignly replied.

  Walking amid the temples and buzzing street life of Bangkok, Roth was tempted to use Conradian adjectives—“ineffable, mysterious, strange”—though perhaps he was most struck by the ubiquitous availability of sex. Prior to his departure he’d had lunch with Cerf, who’d mentioned his own recent trip to Thailand. While his wife, Phyllis, napped in their hotel, the seventy-year-old publisher had gone to a massage parlor where the women gave “happy ending” hand jobs; after doubtfully kneading away at Cerf’s organ, his masseuse had finally smiled and said, “He sleepy.” Roth, too, paid a visit to such a place, but couldn’t bring himself to regale his amused girlfriend until some eight months later, when (she recalled) he related the episode in “the subjunctive pluperfect, or something like that: ‘If one would have stopped off at a massage parlor, one might have . . .’ ”

  Roth and Sproul went on to Cambodia to visit the ruined temples of Angkor Wat, but Roth found the subject for his McCall’s piece when he traveled some fifteen miles south to an inland lake (“like a large tear falling across the face of Cambodia”), hiring a boat to investigate the fifty or so bamboo huts of an impoverished fishing village. Almost two months before Nixon ordered the American “incursion” of that country, Roth wrote “Cambodia: A Modest Proposal”: “And sure as hell, I thought, the day is going to come when the bombers fly in over the heads of these lake dwellers in order to ‘save’ them. From what?” Instead, Roth proposed to drop “food, medicine, and clothing” on the villagers—cheaper than bombs and arguably more in demand. The editors of McCall’s were appalled by the piece (“because it makes fun of the President”), which was finally published in the October 6, 1970, issue of Look.

  * Later Roth remembered sitting on his Persian rug at 18 East Eighty-first Street, eating barbecue chicken, when Capote suddenly appeared on TV and began gleefully slandering him. When I quoted some of his own 1969 letters proving he hadn’t actually watched the show, Roth admitted this was another instance of his fiction supplanting real-life memories; it was in an early draft of Zuckerman Unbound where he’d written about Zuckerman eating chicken and watching Cyrus Caudwell (the Capote character) slander him on a Carson-like show.

  † In that discarded draft of Zuckerman Unbound, Roth invests the fictional version of this encounter with considerably more drama, and gives Cyrus Caudwell some persuasive parting lines. “You’re a squirt, you’re a publicity hound, you’re a venomous gossip, you’re a repellent narcissist, and as a writer of anything and everything you’re tenth-rate,” says Zuckerman, whereupon Caudwell rejoins: “. . . You must stop guarding yourself, and caring what Lionel and Diana [Trilling] think about you and say about you to Fred and Mark and Wystan and Danny and Pearl [various literati]. You wrote that book, now for goodness sake, let them all fuck themselves.”

  ‡ One resemblance between Lonoff and Malamud was that each had a young mistress. The Ghost Writer’s Amy Bellette might have seemed a knowing allusion to Malamud’s two-year affair in the early sixties with a Bennington student, Arlene Heyman, who was herself startled by this aspect of The Ghost Writer: “I think [Roth] made it up,” she said in 2016. “He just happened to hit on something that happened to be true.” Roth claimed he had no definite knowledge of the affair until he read a 2006 memoir by Malamud’s daughter, Janna—this almost thirty years after The Ghost Writer was published; indeed, his own experience with Malamud had given him little reason to suspect the man was capable of such a transgression. (“Is he treating you all right?” Malamud had furtively asked Sproul the first night he met her.) According to Roth, he’d imagined Lonoff’s affair based on little more than the sight of that mysterious young woman sorting manuscripts on the Malamuds’ floor: “I guessed right . . . you know why? I’m a very good writer. Once I begin to make the logic of the character, I find things out that—everything we write is true, as Flaubert said. Poetry is geometry.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-Six

  ONE REASON ROTH GAVE FOR HIS FIVE-WEEK TRIP TO Southeast Asia was a wish to be out of the country because Portnoy “stood no chance of winning” the National Book Award, and indeed wasn’t even among the finalists*—this despite Roth’s having a friend among the judges, Barbara Epstein, who’d apprised him four days before his departure, “I just want you to know that you were first on my list for the NBA but that apparently wasn’t enough.” Cerf was so indignant he boycotted the ceremony, and presently Roth heard a rumor that another judge, Harvey Swados—a friend of Irving Howe—had been strong in his opposition to Portnoy. “Well, you had no friend in Swados,” Pipik remarks to “Roth” in Operation Shylock; “he called the shots on that committee and had it in for you but good. So much animosity—I don’t get it.” Neither did Roth, and it rankled. Thirty-six years later, when Barbara Epstein was dying of cancer, Roth urged his then biographer, Ross Miller, to arrange an interview with her before it was too late, and wrote out a question in which Miller was to affect that he “vaguely remembers” she was a judge:

  Were you a judge? If so, do you remember anything about what went into the judges’ meetings? Meaningless as prizes may be in the long run—even in the short run—this was an inexplicable oversight in the eyes of many and therefore something I’ll [i.e., “Miller”] have to deal with in the biography . . . that a book that has survived as a centerpiece of America’s comic literature into the next century should have received not even passing recognition from the NBA judges . . . well, what should I say about this in my book?

  One consolation was Roth’s induction, on May 26, as the youngest member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Six years before, Updike had been elected at the even more tender age of thirty-two, and he and Roth were sometimes mentioned as the most likely successors, among their age cohort, to Hemingway and Faulkner. Roth often made the point that major writers born roughly ten years earlier than Updike and he—Mailer, Styron, Shaw, James Jones, et al.—were particularly burdened by ideas of manliness inherited from Hemingway: “If you’re just a writer you’re a sissy,” Roth explained, “but if you’re a drinker and a boxer and whatever else, then you’re not a sissy.” Such writers had fought in the war and cultivated the kind of glamor associated with wealth and getting recognized at the Stork Club; but the booze, above all, hampered their productivity, whereas the abstemious children of the Depression—Roth, Updike, DeLillo, et al.—tended to avoid the limelight and keep their noses to the grindstone, hence their astounding output relative to their elders’. “We weren’t idealistic about much,” said Updike of his coevals, “but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition—not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.” Roth likewise longed to emulate such “saints of the imagination” as Flaubert, James, and Conrad, and pointed out that his and Updike’s was “the last pre-television generation” who believed that fiction occupied a sovereign place in American culture, that a serious novelist strove to “meet the measure of one’s colleagues” in claiming the attention of their best readers. “To think that I had to run alongside that remarkable stallion all my writing life,” he said of Updike, whose death in 2009 would lead to Roth’s becoming, a few years later, the longest-serving literary member of what was known by then as the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Back in 1970, the two writers were already a little uneasily aware that they were running neck and neck. Both had published their first acclaimed books in 1959, whereupon Updike, a year older, anticipated Portnoy with his own sexually explicit best seller of 1968, Couples. The following year Updike made a droll reference to the most obvious difference between them when he sent Roth a copy of his long autobiographical poem, Midpoint, with the title crossed out and Poor Goy’s Complaint inserted. Indeed, Updike couldn’t resist reimagining himself as a somewhat more hapless writer, Bech, who is Jewish—a lampoon Roth disliked but forgave, more or less, in light of a kinship that transcended labels of whatever sort. “We’re hicks,” he said. “It’s just because we’re such hicks that we’ve all become so sophisticated. Look at John Updike. Shillington, Pennsylvania. John’s the biggest hick of us all, and he’s the best writer of us all.” Certainly Roth’s all-but-unstinting regard—not always reciprocated—endeared him to his rival, who made a point of cordially introducing himself to Roth’s parents when their son was inducted into the Institute of Arts and Letters. The three Roths, Updike recalled, “radiated wonderful family feeling—fondness for each other and good cheer toward the world at large.”