Crucial, of course, were members of the Baal family—Big John, his father Spit and, of course, his grandfather and originator of the entire sport, Base. And Gil Gamesh is there . . . the tiny Mexican right hander Chico Mecoatl, the speedballer Jolly Cholly Tuminikar, starters Bobo Buchis, Rocky Volos and Deacon Demeter, relievers Pollux and Merzager, Luke Gofannon . . . It was huge fun at the time watching all those gods take to the field once again. Gimme an M! Gimme a U! . . . Come on Mundys!!

  Perhaps needless to say, the book is dedicated to Sproul.

  Roth wrote the bulk of his baseball epic that winter at Yaddo, where he was “hot as a firecracker . . . turning out fiction by the pound, daily.” He finished the book in January, and took his friend Julius Goldstein to a celebratory dinner in Saratoga; the very next day he started The Breast, visiting the library at nearby Skidmore College to bone up on endocrinology.* The idea for a novel about a man who inexplicably turns into a giant breast came partly from Kafka, of course, but also from Roth’s uneasy feeling that Portnoy readers regarded him as a “walking prick.” The better to disguise himself—or maybe just a matter of general high spirits—Roth grew a Groucho mustache during his long winter stay, until one night he helped the elderly Elizabeth Ames back to her quarters along an icy path. “At her door,” Roth remembered, “Elizabeth looked up at me serenely—serenity was her ace in the hole—and said, ‘Philip, do you think that mustache is helping you with your writing?’ I went back to West House and shaved it off.”

  IN 1970, Roth had hired Arthur Klein of Frankfurt, Klein, and Garbus to look after his business affairs.† Since Klein handled the legal side of his book contracts—and since, as Roth put it, publishers “were ready to stuff [money] into my pockets even if no one asked”—he didn’t see the need anymore to give up 10 percent of his earnings to his agent, Donadio, whom he fired over a tearful lunch on February 7, 1972. “You know that you have been as wonderful an agent as a writer could ever want,” he wrote her the next day, also sending flowers. “Unlike Portnoy, I have no complaints”—though he did, a little. Donadio was known to be “very mothering,” especially to favorite male clients such as Joseph Heller, who found it comforting to pass the time shmoozing with her on the phone. “Don’t get me wrong about her sweetness,” said Roth, “but I was not interested in that.” Roth’s own sweetness was mingled with a basic aloofness toward people who, whatever their affinity otherwise, were mainly useful to him as business contacts. “Unlike most young authors whose works we have published,” Bennett Cerf wrote in his posthumous memoir, At Random, “Philip Roth is one I’ve never felt close to; he has always seemed withdrawn, unwilling to make close ties.” At times Roth professed to feel hurt by this rather damning verdict. When Cerf died on August 27, 1971, Roth sent a heartfelt telegram to the widow and attended the funeral with Jason Epstein; he remembered how Cerf had always been “dying to please,” making Roth feel at home in New York after he’d fled the conflagration of his marriage. In the end, though, people like Cerf “were management,” as Roth put it; “I was labor. I didn’t trust anybody.”

  The hard bargain Roth drove for his next two books was liable to test even the most amiable connections. Confident that his slender, quirky novella, The Breast, was “the best thing [he’d] ever done,” Roth asked for an advance of $225,000 with an exorbitant royalty rate of 20 percent for the first 100,000 copies, 25 up to 200,000, and 30 thereafter; the same rate obtained for the even quirkier Great American Novel, for which Roth requested a $236,250 advance. Submitting both books on April 14, 1972, Roth stipulated that The Breast be published first (“no later than October 15, 1972”), to be followed six months later by The Great American Novel. Finally—what would prove the deal breaker—Roth wanted 100 percent of the paperback proceeds instead of the usual 50-50 split with the hardcover publisher. “All of us at Random House are, of course, sorry not to be publishing Philip Roth’s next book,” Bob Bernstein announced on May 25. “We made a substantial offer to try to retain his next work, one that gambled on its being a huge success. If Philip had left Random House for any other reason but money I would be most concerned.”

  “I want to put away any notion that Philip moved from Random House to another conglomerate for a big sum of money,” said Aaron Asher, the new editor in chief at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, who’d signed Roth to a multibook contract. Asher was aware of how sensitive Roth was—would always be—about perceptions of mercenary motive, and indeed Roth’s move in this case was at least partly a matter of friendship, as well as a firm faith in Asher’s skills. Asher’s last big book at Viking before leaving for Holt had been Mr. Sammler’s Planet, which had won Bellow his third National Book Award. Also, he and Roth “were able to agree” on the knotty point of paperback rights, which yielded Roth an uncanny $400,000 for The Breast alone.

  Ever since that first big check for Portnoy, Roth had wanted to buy his own Yaddo: a bucolic retreat roughly two hours from New York, where he could spend summers and long weekends with Sproul and the odd boon companion. He’d made an offer on Broadview, in Woodstock, but the owner wouldn’t sell; then, at a party chez Epstein, he met the painter Cleve Gray and his wife, Francine du Plessix Gray, who was about to publish her second book, Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress. Because he and Sproul were planning to stop in Hawaii on their way back from a spring vacation to Japan, Roth had read Gray’s book in galleys and liked it; the two couples subsequently arranged to have dinner in New York, and the Grays mentioned that a house was for sale a mile and a half down the road from them in tiny Warren, Connecticut. The location, at least, was ideal: Litchfield County, in the northwest corner of the state amid the Berkshire foothills, was two hours from New York and three from Boston; better still, there was no railroad in the area, which made it hard to reach via public transportation—one of the reasons its sparse population included such diverse luminaries as Jasper Johns, Henry Kissinger, and Bill Styron, who noted (in a 1954 letter to his then friend Mailer) that it was “distant enough to give a feeling of isolation and to be removed from the dreary station-wagon community belt but close enough so that the delights, such as they are, of Manhattan are not too difficult of access.” Roth was still at Yaddo in early February, so Sproul went alone with a real estate agent to inspect the house in Warren. “We’ll take it,” she said, while still in the driveway.

  The gray two-story clapboard farmhouse, built in 1799, was “the most beautiful house I ever saw,” said Sproul, and there were other reasons to love it. Among the most important, for Roth, was that the house faced away from the main road, the front door opening onto a vista of maple and ash trees and the fields beyond, crisscrossed by mossy, venerable, low stone walls. Inside the front door was an elegant spindle staircase, original to the house along with the chestnut and oak plank floors; to the left of the entrance hall was a living room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a big fireplace, to the right was a parlor with paneled cupboards, more bookcases, and another fireplace. But Roth’s favorite part of the house was the Stone Room: a cavernous former woodshed with a high, beamed ceiling, stone floor, and french windows. Outbuildings included a barn and carport, as well as a dilapidated 17-by-32-foot cottage about fifty yards from the house. Flat Rock Farm—soon to be rechristened “The Fiction Factory”—included forty acres of land, and Roth bought it for $110,000 in cash.

  They closed on April 13, and moved in after a trip to Europe (instead of Japan); that first night, May 19, they sat in the empty living room on lawn chairs they’d brought over from Woodstock, and the next morning—a happy day—the furniture began to arrive. “We operated on the ‘mud principle,’ ” said Roth, “which established that because the house was set in acres of fields and was at the intersection of two dirty roads, you should be able to track mud into any room.” Once again with Nina Schneider’s guidance, they’d bought a lot of sturdy but exquisite country furniture from Pierre Deux in the Village, such as an old refectory table with little gashes along the surface where bread had been chopped. Sproul herself gave Roth a number of cherished objets such as a little scroll calendar on the fireplace mantel in the living room; Roth, keenly preoccupied with the passage of time, made a point of turning the little knob every morning of his life in Connecticut. Forty years later Sproul went back to care for Roth during an illness, and everything was almost exactly the way she’d left it.

  “The best thing I ever did in my life,” Roth said of the move—and so began one of his happiest eras, and one of his most stable. “I’m a great sucker for domesticity,” he liked to stress. “I don’t want to sit in fucking Elaine’s. I want to have dinner, have a drink . . . read, get in bed, fuck, and go to sleep. What else is there? Then in the morning go back to my place, work, and so on. And every day more or less the same.” As ever, it helped that Sproul was an even-tempered, industrious person who loved him. They almost never argued. When Roth got on her nerves enough to make her think fuck you, she’d notice him all but reeling from the unspoken blow, and hence took pains to keep mean thoughts to a minimum. For their first Valentine’s Day in Connecticut, Roth drew her a big heart whose arrow tip was an ejaculating penis.

  Roth furnished the separate little cottage with a cot reminding him of his first studio in the woods at Yaddo, and went on from there. That first year he added a toilet, replaced what was left of the flooring, and arranged for heat and a phone that didn’t take incoming calls. A few years later he added a bed-cum-exercise-room and a screened porch in back; the place became so cozy he took to sleeping there in the winter when he was alone, returning to the main house only for meals. In the early years, though, he was rarely alone except when working, but then resolutely so. “Malamud has already been at it for two hours,” he’d fret around nine in the morning, departing for his studio while Sproul went about her own work. One day she bumped into him getting lunch in the kitchen, and began to ask a question. “I only look like I’m not working,” he said, clinging to a train of thought, and thereafter she kept mum until their late-afternoon hikes along the Housatonic River or swims in Lake Waramaug.

  Roth’s favorite holiday, Thanksgiving,‡ was a sprawling festival during the Sproul era: she cooked “vast turkeys and sweet potatoes” along with a big batch of her Julia Child mushroom soup, while sending Roth out for pies, paté, caviar, and the like. For that first holiday in Connecticut, they invited as many as twenty guests—Bess and Herman, Sandy§ and his boys, the Gustons, Solotaroffs, Goldstein, Lelchuk and his girlfriend, various others—and played a frenzied game of touch football on the back lawn while Herman and Guston observed bemusedly (“waiting for a broken limb”) from the studio porch. For the meal they all sat down at Roth’s beloved refectory table, the fire crackling away. “I loved those days,” he said wistfully.

  Local friends included Bill Styron and Arthur Miller—both men a little problematic, each in his own way. Styron took a shine to Sproul and sometimes made lurching passes at her when drunk, whereas Miller told rambling stories about “Marilyn,” while Roth—the respectful younger colleague—suffered in silence. Roth’s private opinion of Miller, the man and his work, wasn’t terribly high to begin with and seemed to plummet over time, as Alfred Kazin noticed when the subject of Miller’s memoir, Timebends, came up one night in Warren: “Philip wouldn’t let go,” Kazin wrote in his diary, “insisted on wiping the floor with Arthur north south west and east—bad writer, no thinker . . . on and on.” Not surprisingly Roth saw little of Miller in later years, when he liked to say (as Styron reported to their mutual friend Brustein), “it is only the prospect of the Nobel Prize that keeps Arthur Miller alive from October to October.”

  The woman who would eventually become one of Roth’s bitterest foes, Francine du Plessix Gray, gave him a warm welcome when he arrived in 1972—all the more since he was about to publish The Breast, which (said Roth) struck her as avant-garde. During that first dinner at the Grays’ in Connecticut, Roth sat next to Francine’s Russian mother, Tatiana, whom he remembered introducing herself as follows: “Why do you write book called Breast? I hate my breasts!” When Roth and Sproul got into their car afterward for the three-minute drive home, they announced in unison, “I never want to see those people again as long as I live!” For several years, though, Roth endeavored to cultivate a pleasant “professional” friendship with Francine, offering “polite but candid” appraisals of her work. He thought she’d found her métier with the Hawaii book, and advised her to go on writing about the other forty-nine states à la the old WPA American Guide Series. “You just don’t want me to write fiction,” she laughed.

  Roth claimed that Francine longed for a less professional friendship, and indeed he believed her frustration in that respect was a factor in her later animosity. “She fell in love with me and was dying to get laid,” he said in 2012. “It was a crush.” When asked whether he’d ever succumbed to temptation, Roth indignantly denied it (“How crazy do you think I am?”), though others contradicted him on that point. A later mistress, who knew them both well, said that Roth had told her repeatedly about an early seduction, a reminiscence that ended with the refrain, “Not one of my proudest moments.” Gray, for her part, was every bit as staunch in her denial: “I’m very lucky not to have been romantically involved with him,” she said, insisting she’d turned him down the one time (“between Barbara Sproul and Claire”) he asked her to dinner.

  As for her husband, Cleve, Roth considered him a painter of admirable skill as well as a refined, intelligent human being—the scion of a wealthy Upper East Side Jewish family who’d changed his name from Ginsberg to Gray when he went to Princeton. (“She should have been Francine du Plessix Ginsberg,” said Roth, “then I would have been friends with her.”) Sproul agreed that Cleve was “a sweet, dear man” and echoed the consensus that he was essentially gay. Joel Conarroe, while house-sitting for Roth in the autumn of 1977 (Roth was in London), described a dinner attended by the Grays and the writer Leonard Michaels, who was teaching that year at Bard. “Queen Francine,” Conarroe wrote Roth, was “very taken” with Michaels,

  calls him Byronic, sometimes refers to him as Byron; she came 16 times during dinner Monday night. . . . [Michaels] said he had met you, wondered whether you are still funny. Francine said oh ha ha ha yes he’s very funny. So funny. Cleve got nervous when Michaels went on at some length about Byron’s homosexuality, but Francine kept egging him on. . . . If there are saints in this world Cleve is a fucking saint.

  Roth would not have disagreed; one of his main objections to the Grays, as company, was having to witness Francine’s incessant browbeating of her husband (“Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”—etc.). He was glad to hear that one night, at another friend’s house, Cleve had gotten fed up enough to shy a salad plate at her.

  ROTH HADN’T WANTED to risk losing the house in Connecticut, so they canceled their six-week vacation to Japan; instead, after the closing, they departed for an eighteen-day tour of Venice, Vienna, and Prague. In the window of the Café Sacher, in Vienna, they were delighted to find a marzipan arrangement of Nixon and his cabinet; a few days later they crossed in a taxi from sunny Austria to Czechoslovakia—like entering a “coal-mining town in West Virginia,” said Sproul. When they finally reached Prague and checked into the Hotel Jalta on Wenceslas Square, Sproul needed to lie down and sleep off a migraine, while Roth went out looking for landmarks associated with his beloved Kafka. “It’s the most wonderful place!” he said hours later, remarking that he’d already bought “a sauerkraut or something on the street” when she asked whether he was hungry: “I realized he was in love,” said Sproul, since Roth would never eat street food (what with his mother’s constant haranguing about chazerai) unless he felt viscerally at home in a place.

  For the next three days Roth walked and walked around Old Town Square, visiting the places he’d read about in Kafka’s letters and diaries and in Max Brod’s biography—Kafka’s old gymnasium, his father Hermann’s business—and also straying into the sooty medieval alleys of the old Jewish ghetto, where he toured the synagogues Hitler had hoped to turn into a vast museum commemorating his destruction of European Jewry. Every day Roth returned to the forlorn, crow-ridden Old Jewish Cemetery behind the Pinkas Synagogue, which housed a little museum for the victims of Theresienstadt; Roth (“somewhat stunned”) studied photographs of Prague’s Jewish artists and intellectuals, who’d created a newspaper and drama society in the concentration camp, a soccer league, and a children’s theater; there was also a little boy’s Mickey Mouse doll with a yellow star pinned to its chest. At last he made his way to the New Jewish Cemetery, adding a pebble to the pile beside Kafka’s grave. “I understood that a connection of sorts existed between myself and this place,” he later wrote; “here was one of those dense corners of Jewish Europe which Hitler had emptied of Jews, a place which in earlier days must have been not unlike those neighborhoods in Austro-Hungarian Lemberg and Czarist Kiev, where the two branches of my own family had lived before their emigration to America at the beginning of the century.”