Czech translations of Roth’s first two books had been published by Odéon Editions, and on his second morning in Prague he was warmly received there by the director and his staff, who toasted him with slivovitz. Roth wondered whether they were interested in publishing his latest books, Portnoy and Our Gang, and was told that, alas, the “authorities” had deemed the books unsuitable for translation. Afterward Roth was approached by an editor with a slight limp, Eva Kondrysova, who asked him if he’d like to have lunch with her. “All those people are swine,” she informed him at the restaurant, and in perfect English (she’d spent time at the University of Florida on a Fulbright) explained that all the decent people at the firm had been sacked after the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring in 1968. Books like Portnoy were hardly in accord with the new mandate of politicized “socrealism,” but she happened to know that the esteemed translating couple Luba and Rudolf Pellar—also translators of Hemingway and Salinger—were working on a Czech version of Roth’s novel.

  That night he and Sproul dined with the Pellars, who, after several bottles of wine, reviewed the more idiomatically challenging obscenities in Portnoy “amid gales of laughter”: an act of cunnilingus, for instance, had been roughly translated as “he licked her pan” (“you know, lick the pan of the roast?”). More soberly, the couple discussed the indignities visited on liberal-minded writers, artists, and scholars under the hard-line regime headquartered in the Prague Castle. “I can’t put out one more play about love in the cucumber factory in Siberia,” said Luba, still head of the national theater but desperate to retire. Under Soviet “normalization,” writers of conscience fell into three basic categories: those who’d managed to flee the country or stay abroad during the summer invasion in 1968; those who’d already been imprisoned; and those who were kept under constant surveillance, forbidden to publish and relegated to menial jobs and the lowest category of housing. As Milan Kundera explained, such systematic destruction of Czech culture “undermined the identity of the nation, enabling it to be more easily swallowed up by Russian civilization . . . [and] put a violent end to the modern era, the era in which culture still represented the realization of supreme values.”

  When Roth got back to New York, he asked Bob Silvers to put him in touch with any Czech intellectuals he happened to know, and so came to befriend Antonín (Tony) Liehm. As Liehm recalled of their first meeting at the Russian Tea Room, Roth said, “I’ve just published a pamphlet against Nixon. . . . It’s selling like hotcakes, and all that can happen to me is that I’ll get a little richer. While, with you, writers that do about the same thing can count on going to prison. And I have this need to understand why they do it.” Liehm gave Roth a little history lesson going back to the Soviet-backed coup d’état of 1948. In 1960, Liehm himself had become editor of Literární noviny (Literary Journal), Czechoslovakia’s most influential culture magazine, with a circulation of 300,000 in a country whose total population was ten million; working with the likes of Kundera, Ludvík Vaculík, and Ivan Klíma, the magazine had served as the foremost platform for liberalization leading to the Prague Spring, and hence had ceased publication once the Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into the country on August 20, 1968. Liehm had fled to Paris two days later, and within a couple of years had wangled a job at Richmond College of CUNY on Staten Island, where he taught a course in Eastern European cinema.

  Every Tuesday afternoon that fall, Roth took the Staten Island ferry to watch and discuss the weekly movie in Liehm’s class. Like most Americans then, Roth had no idea who Kundera was until he saw an adaptation of The Joke, and meanwhile he also befriended the exiled director Jiří Weiss after watching Weiss’s Ninety Degrees in the Shade. (One of Weiss’s better-known protégés, Miloš Forman, would later become one of Roth’s neighbors in Warren.) When Roth returned to Prague the following year, Weiss entrusted him with a pair of American jeans to bring to his daughter. Weiss was twenty years older than Roth and had had a young wife, who left him; in Deception Roth imagined a Weiss-like Czech who berates him, “Philip,” for sleeping with his wife: “A really good imitation,” said Roth, of what would have occurred in that case.

  THE BREAST, published in September 1972, was not a success. “The overwhelming reaction has been negative,” Roth wrote Maschler; he was especially bitter about the New York Times reviews, both of which were not only negative but egregious as criticism. Fully a third of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s review was padded with a long quote from Roth’s novel (“I am a breast . . .”), and the rest was mostly taken up by a cutely sustained boxing metaphor: Roth’s outrageous premise, said Lehmann-Haupt, “almost, but not quite, knocks us out” in “round one,” but then the book “dithers itself away in feints at political allegory, in shadowboxing with psychoanalytic insights,” and so on. As for John Gardner’s review in the Sunday Times, it was so pompous and bewildering that even the Book Review’s editor, John Leonard, admitted to Aaron Asher, Roth’s editor, that it should never have been published. Gardner wrote:

  The highest value in fiction (as everyone has always known except novelty freaks and, of course, the criticism industry) is moral stability, the ability to celebrate reality without distorting or evading it. . . . Sloppiness and self-indulgence, as in such earlier Roth novels as When She Was Good and Portnoy’s Complaint, debase the vision, making it seem either false or silly. Feebleness of invention, as in some of his early stories, limits the vision to, at best, the merely touching.

  Having trashed Roth’s oeuvre as sloppy, self-indulgent, false, silly, or merely touching, Gardner commended The Breast as his best book—“Technically, at least”—but hastened to clarify that it, too, was a failure: “like a hung-up schoolboy or like the trendy popular novelist he is,” Roth indulges too much in gratuitous nastiness, such as the way Kepesh, in the novel, notices the discoloration of his penis that portends his turning into a breast (a marvelous passage). Gardner rested his case: “As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn’t do it, don’t.”

  Back in July, Roth had thanked Solotaroff for his forthcoming rave in Esquire (Roth “is at the top of his talent and control,” etc.), though he worried the overall reception “ain’t gonna be clear sailing all the way,” given that neither Bellow nor Philip Rahv had liked the book. “Frankly, it left me mystified,” Rahv wrote the author; whereas Kafka’s approach in The Metamorphosis made the uncanny seem believable and was in the service of a comprehensible metaphor (“guilt for displacing the father and restitution”), Roth’s aims were more opaque, to put it mildly. While he seemed intent on imitating Kafka’s realism—describing precisely how the breast is washed, for example—he did so selectively, ignoring a breast’s primary function. “The breast is a feeding organ,” Rahv pointed out, “but it is hard to imagine your particular hero as obsessed by very strong desires to feed others.” Peter Prescott—in a Newsweek review that praised, among other things, Roth’s “sure-handed craftsmanship”—put his finger on what was perhaps the main difficulty: “Roth did not decide whether it was to be a buoyant farce like Gogol’s story [“The Nose”], or a dark parable like Kafka’s.”

  Once again, Roth and Lelchuk prepared an interview (this time for The New York Review of Books) meant to serve as an explanatory rebuttal. “In The Breast,” said Roth, “my approach to the outlandish seems to me to be something like a blending of the two methods”—those of Gogol and Kafka both, whose influence is made “visible” in the book when Kepesh wonders whether his repeatedly teaching their two key stories has something to do with his predicament. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s awakening as a dung beetle is precisely described: “He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and it was about to slide off completely.”¶ Similarly, in The Breast, Roth puts his endocrinology research to good use, as Kepesh remarks on his “spongy consistency” and helps the reader visualize him as vividly as Kafka’s beetle: “At one end I am rounded off like a watermelon, at the other I terminate in a nipple, cylindrical in shape, projecting five inches from my ‘body’ and perforated at the tip with seventeen openings, the apertures of the lactiferous ducts.” Rather than go all the way, however—as Rahv would have it—and evoke Kepesh’s primary function as a “feeding organ,” Roth focuses on the more farcical, Gogolian possibilities of his hero’s disastrously heightened erotic susceptibility: “I would like to fuck you with my nipple,” Kepesh tells a nurse. “Did you hear me, whore? Did you hear what I want?”

  As for metaphorical clarity, Roth quietly answered Rahv (via Lelchuk) by pointing out that any attempt to assign a single meaning to Kafka’s work was bound to lessen its appeal, and so with The Breast: “To try to unravel the mystery of ‘meaning’ here is really to participate to some degree in Kepesh’s struggle—and to be defeated, as he is.” In the end, Kepesh merely accepts the reality of his fate (“he is a breast, and must act accordingly”), and is left to wrestle with the kind of breast he wishes to be: whether he will degenerate into pure sensualism (“I don’t want her to read to me—I don’t even listen,” he tells Dr. Klinger of his girlfriend; “I just want her to squeeze me and suck me and lick me”) or become an organ of higher purpose—a fanciful version of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” in short, wherein “strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.”

  For the rest of his life, Roth would believe The Breast was particularly worthy of rediscovery, even going to the trouble of thoroughly revising it for inclusion in The Philip Roth Reader (1980). The main problem with the original version, he seemed to think, was its too-mannered diction, which was perhaps meant to mimic a rather floridly translated European novel. “Because I knew there was no one really to assist me, I was never able to complete the transaction other than in a haze of magical masturbatory possibilities” is a typical passage that Roth saw fit to excise, substituting simply “Who would help me?”# Six months before his death, Roth remarked that Kafka’s Metamorphosis remained the “best trans-species story,” but he insisted the best “transgender novel” was The Breast, “where a man is trapped not merely in a woman’s body but in the universally fetishized emblem of womanhood.” His parents’ view, however, would appear to be more in accord with posterity. “Ma,” Roth said to the flummoxed Bess, when she sheepishly returned the book to him, “you don’t have to say anything.” As for Herman, he sat quietly in his son’s garden with The Breast that first summer in Connecticut. “I have a feeling,” Roth wrote a friend, “that if I steal over in that direction I may find him asleep.”

  And yet he was more obsessed than ever with Kafka after his first trip to Czechoslovakia, and next wrote a more explicit tribute that he dedicated to his students in that fall’s Kafka course at Penn: “ ‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka” was written, he said, to correct their tendency “to read Kafka as though he had written his stories on Mars, or in graduate school, instead of in Prague.” The opening ten pages or so consist of an essay about Kafka’s last years before his death at age forty; had he lived, Roth noted, his skull would have been shoveled out of the ovens along with those of his three younger sisters—a complex irony, given his lifelong sense of persecution on the one hand, and alienation from Jews or at least his own Jewish family on the other. “What have I in common with the Jews?” Kafka wrote in his diary. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” Roth then imagines a Kafka who lives to flee the Nazis and become a Hebrew school teacher at Schley Street Synagogue in 1942, when Kafka is fifty-nine and Roth (though the first-person narrator never refers to himself by name) a child of nine. The boy—“Little borscht-belt comic that I am”—torments his teacher by dubbing him Dr. Kishka (Yiddish for “insides”) because of his sour breath and mimics “his precise and finicky professorial manner, his German accent, his gloom.” The narrator’s father (quite in keeping with how Herman himself might have behaved) tries to play matchmaker between lonely Dr. Kafka and the spinster Aunt Rhoda (inspired by Roth’s Aunt Honey), but the courtship goes awry when the couple visit Atlantic City, for reasons that can be discussed only in Yiddish around the children; the narrator’s brother, however, hisses an explanation into his ear: “Sex!”

  Roth loved the hybrid piece**—a foray into alternative history that he would repeat more extensively in novels such as The Ghost Writer and The Plot Against America, and never mind his more and more elaborate muddling of fact and fiction generally. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he told an interviewer who wondered, in 1987, whether “Looking at Kafka” was basically autobiographical except for the one detail of Kafka’s survival. “Kafka was my Hebrew teacher. Only my name is not Roth.”

  * During a visit to Yaddo, the novelist Jonathan Lethem was shown to the turreted Breast Room, so named (he was told) because Roth had been “inspired by dwelling within the room’s contour” to write The Breast.

  † He’d chosen the firm because of his friendship with Garbus, who was mostly a litigator. Shirley Fingerhood remained a friend of sorts—she would preside at his second wedding—though she’d served primarily as his matrimonial lawyer and was no longer needed in that capacity after Maggie’s death.

  ‡ A lyrical passage about the holiday, in American Pastoral, provides the book’s title: “And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff—no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people—one colossal turkey feeds all. . . . It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.”

  § A widower as of 1970, when his first wife, Trudy, died of ovarian cancer. More about that later.

  ¶ In Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation, Samsa turns into a “gigantic insect” that’s generally understood to be a cockroach. Vladimir Nabokov, however, in his Cornell lectures, insisted Kafka was describing a dung beetle, and he persuaded me.

  # For his revision Roth used a copy of the 1973 Corgi (U.K.) paperback, almost every page of which is scored heavily with his black Flair pen. The revised text is the one that appears in the Library of America.

  ** The following year he chose it for inclusion in Rust Hills’s anthology This Is My Best, for which (per the title) the authors selected their own favorite works.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-Eight

  IN THE OCTOBER 1972 ESQUARE (AS PART OF A FEATURE in which four older writers each contributed an essay about a colleague under the age of thirty-five), Roth wrote in praise of Lelchuk’s soon-tobe-published American Mischief, albeit with some pretty grave reservations whereof he warned his friend in advance—in essence, he liked the first half of the 500-plus-page novel but not so much the second: “If I had to say what went wrong, it has to do with character (yours, boy) and temperament, as much as with writing talent—in your case, for good and bad, they’re inseparable. . . . Lenny”—Pincus, the protagonist—“is really a whiney prick.” In his Esquire piece, Roth duly noted the “mean, pricky streak” that mars the novel’s latter part, but also singled out Pincus’s murder of Norman Mailer (“firing the fatal bullet up the author’s determinedly virginal anus”) as among the book’s “felicitous pages.”

  Back at Yaddo, the two friends had wondered how Mailer would respond to such an ignominious demise even in fiction, concluding he probably wouldn’t like it much—but, as Roth reflected, “since he was a writer whose animating principle was to assault every constraint of conventional decency in order to bring linguistic life to the unimaginable and unknown, he would probably have no choice but to grudgingly respect the boldness of the bad taste as well as the impulse that informed it.” Roth was particularly thinking of Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro,” in which he seems to commend the courage, or existential authenticity, of two young thugs who murder a candy-store owner—a passage that inspires Pincus to murder him.

  Shortly after Roth’s Esquire piece appeared, Mailer got in touch with Lelchuk’s editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Henry Robbins, and proposed that Lelchuk meet him in a bar; Mailer would bring along his friend Pete Hamill as a “second,” and suggested that Lelchuk bring Roth. “Well, if you’re out of your mind, you’ll do it,” said Roth, when Lelchuk apprised him of the idea, “but without me as your ‘second,’ old friend.” Instead Roth suggested they meet at his lawyers’ offices, since Marty Garbus often handled publishing disputes related to censorship issues, and besides Mailer would be less apt to commit some form of drunken mayhem in a law office at nine in the morning, when Roth scheduled the meeting (claiming he had to leave by eleven). Twelve years had passed since Mailer had stabbed and nearly killed his second wife, though Mailer had shown few signs of mellowing when Roth ran into him three years later, at a Paris Review party, where Roth and Plimpton had to pry him off the writer Harold (“Doc”) Humes, whose eyes Mailer seemed intent on gouging out of his skull. Given that Roth had made a rather derisive reference to Mailer in “Writing American Fiction” (to the effect that Mailer surely had less time for writing novels now that he was “an actor in the cultural drama” and thus occupied with being “a sociologist, a journalist, or even the Mayor of New York”), and now had characterized the murder of a fictional Mailer as “felicitous,” it was safe to assume Mailer was not terribly well disposed.*

  The stakes could hardly be higher for Lelchuk: if Farrar, Straus and Giroux were pressured into dropping the Mailer scene, then the entire second half of the book would have to be recast, since Pincus is arrested and jailed because of the murder. Both Lelchuk and Roth spent the week poring over Mailer’s pertinent writings in preparation for the Saturday meeting at Garbus’s office; then, after his Friday classes, Lelchuk caught the shuttle from Boston and headed straight to Roth’s apartment, where the two conducted a mock-debate in which Roth played the part of Mailer: “You’re a terrible writer and your book is shit,” said Roth/Mailer. “What do you have to say to that?” This would prove decorous next to the real thing.