In later years Bloom would often concede that Roth “had tried at first to be kind and understanding of [her] daughter,” as she told Charlie Rose in 1996; but the situation was fraught, to put it mildly, given the damage inflicted by her “brief and ridiculous” marriage to Elkins. In 1977 Anna was a seventeen-year-old singing student at the Guildhall School, and Roth’s vague impression at the time was that she mostly lived with her grandmother while Claire “came and went as an actress.” He had every reason to imagine that relations between mother and daughter were “loving and cordial,” he said, though in fact certain passages in Bloom’s letters might have given him pause. On Anna’s sixteenth birthday, so Claire had written him, the mother was forced to “cower” in her room rather than mingle with the girl’s guests, and a few months later she described “a dreadful scene” involving “AWFUL” insults because Anna had wanted to stay in London, alone, while Claire departed yet again for New York.

  “We moved to London and at first it was all peaceful,” she wrote in Doll’s House, a state of affairs that Roth emended as “family hell.” For three days after his arrival, so he recalled, Anna was missing; that first day he was entertaining the playwright Tom Stoppard (an Anglo Czech who was also interested in the plight of dissidents), when Bloom’s sister-in-law phoned to say they couldn’t locate Anna anywhere and were notifying the police. Then, on the third day, Anna appeared and casually announced she’d been staying with a friend. That evening the three sat down for their first family meal. The mood, as Roth later noted, was “tense”:

  Anna sat stewing at her place. Eating mechanically without looking up, while Bloom, trying far too hard, as she would continue doing incessantly from the day I arrived to the day I left, asked the girl sweet, motherly questions of no consequence that remained unanswered and appeared only to feed Anna’s scorn. And then the fight broke out. I couldn’t say now over exactly what, but mother and daughter were up from the table and into the living room, where, first, they were merely screaming at each other, then punches were being thrown and blows being struck—and then Anna screamed at her mother, “Kike bitch!”

  I rushed into the living room and separated the two of them. “You can’t use that language around here, ever,” I told Anna, “and you cannot strike your mother. Both are forbidden.” I’m tempted to say that from this moment forward Anna never gave up on the idea of me as the enemy, if it hadn’t been that I was the enemy even before I arrived.

  Though reticent about her other differences with Roth—content, that is, to stand by the accounts given in her book—Bloom was roused to dismiss the above scene as categorically false. “The idea that Anna ‘punched’ me, her mother, or threatened me in any way whatsoever, or used anti semitic slurs is pure and utter nonsense,” she wrote in a 2013 email. Anna Steiger was even more strident in her denial. Roth, she wrote, “NEVER, EVER physically restrained me as in any case I am not physical when angry and more to the point, he is an immense physical coward. . . . As for the anti-semitic slurs that’s most strange for him to invent. However, it is an invention.” Roth was unsurprised by their denials (“It’s too shaming to acknowledge”) and stony in his insistence that the scene transpired precisely as he described it for his biographer, and barely fictionalized it in I Married a Communist: “The ‘kike’ part was indelible because it was partially for my benefit and aimed at me,” he explained in 2015. “As for the ‘bitch’ part, that was a part of her repertoire.”

  The next day, his fourth in London, Roth went looking for a flat of his own in the same neighborhood. He declined simply to return to the States—because his homes in New York and Connecticut were already occupied, and because he was still devoted to Bloom and determined to make things work. He visited an American lawyer, Bob Gurland, who advised him that taking an apartment in London would have “disastrous” tax consequences. Also, when he mentioned his plan to Bloom, she “dropped to her knees,” he said, and begged him to stay. So he stayed. “I’m not going to be defeated by this kid,” he remembered thinking.

  They hired a carpenter who converted the entire third floor into a separate apartment for Anna: a kitchenette was added, and the little spare room Roth had used as a study became a dining/sitting room. Meanwhile the girl’s presence on Fawcett Street was relatively scarce—she was at school all day and tended to spend weekends visiting friends and attending concerts—and, after that one rebuke their first night together, Roth was careful not to argue with her. “She is turning out to be rather cooperative, and even some fun, now that the initial period of adjustment seems to have ended,” he wrote hopefully to Conarroe.

  “Anna is nuts,” he wrote Riki Wagman. “A great pain in the ass who has spent the last two weeks trying to sabotage Claire’s opening. . . . I just take off for my study (studio that is) in the morning and at home don’t have much to do with her other than to ask her to turn down the punk rock on the record player every night. There will be problems there, and I feel sorry for the girl. She is fatter than ever and so confused and self-defeating. . . . But for the last month I’ve just tried to keep Claire and her apart.” The three of them still had dinner together from time to time, and their “obsessive discussions” (as Bloom herself described them) were entirely focused on Anna’s life and interests as a Guildhall student. Roth was appalled by the “abject woman” Bloom became in her daughter’s presence—so unlike the witty, intelligent, self-possessed celebrity he’d come to know during the first year of their affair.

  One morning in March—what would generally be described as the “most shocking part” of Doll’s House—a grim-faced Roth “thrust a letter” into Bloom’s hand. By then he’d learned that if he wanted to impart his thoughts on any remotely controversial matter, it was best to commit them to paper, since conversation was hampered by Bloom’s tendency to scream and run away, sobbing, or assume a kind of wary crouch and cry, “Don’t go for me,” which Roth took to mean she feared some form of bodily harm. The letter, dated March 14, 1978, was only summarized very briefly in Doll’s House; its main contents are given here:

  Though of course I am prepared to live with you and Anna until June 1st, when we leave for Conn., I think it would be a mistake to try to repeat this living arrangement again next year. The dynamics of your relationship with Anna make me tremendously uncomfortable, in large part because I know how very uncomfortable they make you. As the saying goes, you are either at each other’s throats or at each other’s feet, and it is emotionally exhausting for the both of you. . . . I think it is very clear to you that when we live alone—either in the country, or when Anna has been away on a trip—there is a richness to our lives that simply withers away when we have to deal with the daily problems that are a consequence of the impasse which you and Anna have reached.

  Roth proposed two alternatives: either Bloom would come live with him year-round in the States, in which case he’d gladly pay her way to visit Anna and her mother every month, or else Anna would go live in the Guildhall music hostel, Henry Wood House:

  I have telephoned them to inquire about living arrangements (not for Anna, of course, but only generally, as an interested parent). There are single rooms for £18 a week; the rate may go up some next year in Sept. . . . She would be near the school, she would never have to worry for companionship—and she will actually discover (I will bet you a hundred pounds tonight on this) that she likes it better herself. You will stop being the central problem in her life; we will stop being people who exclude her, and become people she can rely upon to help her as she moves on in school and towards her career—in brief, the whole childish side of her life will begin to dissolve. As it simply will not, so long as she is at home with her mother and a man who is not her father, but is really willing to be a friend. Of course she is going to resist this and be angry immediately at the idea. But so too does she reject the idea of a diet. . . .

  Lastly. The sooner the better. It is not after all hell one is consigning Anna to. I am only suggesting that she live like eighty per cent of the university and college students in the world. There are reasons for dormitories and university residence halls, and you know every last one of them. Children are too old to live at home but not old enough to rent houses or flats of their own or parents don’t have money to pay for houses or flats.

  Bloom would impute sinister motives to Roth’s epistolary gambit—without, again, bothering to spell out the details, or else baldly misrepresenting them (“No explanation,” she told Charlie Rose of the letter; “he just said he can’t go on living like that”). It was not so much about “hatred,” she wrote in her memoir, as “control. . . . Philip made character assessments the way surgeons make incisions. . . . If I was willing to jettison my own daughter in this manner, what could I ever deny him?” Nevertheless she came to the “shameful” decision that would invariably cause her, later, to choke up during media interviews: “Anna was asked to move out,” she concluded the episode in Doll’s House. “She was eighteen.”

  “So somber, so tragic, so tellingly concise,” Roth observed, “as if she were writing, ‘Anna was asked to move out. She was two.’ ” He then directed the reader to proceed seven paragraphs further in Doll’s House to “the anticlimax of anticlimaxes”: “Anna moved back home”—as she did, he claimed, within five months of moving to Henry Wood House, where in any case she’d spent only a few days per week before returning to Fawcett Street more or less permanently for many years. (“It wasn’t that I sacrificed my daughter,” Bloom rallies a little to her own defense while chatting with Charlie Rose. “Frankly my daughter in a year [sic] came back to the house.”)# As Roth would tell friends during the difficult times ahead, “Maggie sent Anna to me.”

  * Though named Elizabeth, Bloom’s mother was always called Alice, from the Yiddish Alische.

  † The U.K. edition was relatively well reviewed and made a few best-seller lists.

  ‡ One of the titular innocents in the play—the little girl, Flora—was played by an eleven-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker, later of Sex and the City fame.

  § In 2011, Roth emphasized that Christa was only a friend (“we never slept together”), and while he made the same point during a 2005 interview with Ross Miller—“we were friends, not lovers”—he also admitted they’d gone to bed “once, maybe twice, it wasn’t for me . . .”

  ¶ A pseudonym. The real-life Inga could hardly have been more candid about things, though she asked not to be named for her family’s sake. My account of her affair with Roth is as accurate as I could make it, though certain details about Inga’s background have been altered.

  # Not only was Anna Steiger enduringly furious about her hostel digs in the “insalubrious” neighborhood of Peckham, but she moreover indignantly denied that she moved back to Fawcett Street except for a few brief years and incidental visits: “I moved from [Henry Wood House] and into an apartment which I rented with another friend for a couple of years,” she wrote on November 5, 2015. “I must have been about 21/22 when I moved back home”; she noted, however, that her career soon got under way and she was often touring, and she also claimed to have moved into her own apartment at age twenty-five, never again living full-time on Fawcett Street.

  I shared this email with Roth, who replied the same day: “I repeat: from 1976[77], when I moved to London, until Anna did indeed . . . buy an apartment several blocks away from Fawcett St in the late 80s, the bulk of Anna’s living and sleeping took place on the third floor of Fawcett St. As Claire makes very clear in her book, she, Claire, could not bear life any other way.”

  CHAPTER

  Thirty-One

  IN 1974, ROTH SAID THAT HIS NOVELS TENDED TO BE “spawned by the interplay between my previous fiction, recent undigested personal history, the circumstances of my immediate, everyday life, and the books I’ve been reading and teaching.” The Professor of Desire, composed in desperation after almost three years of foundering, was the quintessence of such a patchwork. His second Kepesh novel absorbed all his latest preoccupations about teaching, Kafka, Czechoslovakia, sexual libertinism, and so on, though it began as a vague notion to write some kind of sequel to The Breast about what becomes of Kepesh after he leaves the hospital and appears on the Johnny Carson show, say, or donates his “transformed carcass” to science. In the end it was more conducive to the use of Roth’s real-life materials to write a prequel—who was David Kepesh before he became a breast?—and indeed he considered The Life I Formerly Led as a title. Roth’s main preoccupation, and hence that of the book, was the failure of his love affair with Barbara Sproul, and on completion he admitted that the Kepesh of Professor bore little more than nominal resemblance to the hero of The Breast.

  His new publisher, Roger Straus, read the manuscript over Easter weekend 1977 at his home in Purchase, New York, and commended the author for successfully weaving his “philosophical concepts” into the everyday life of his protagonist; what Straus arguably liked best about the book, however, was that it constituted a “highly salable” return to form for an author whose bawdy humor, in the context of a realistic story, was most likely to bring home the bacon. Meanwhile the prestige of Farrar, Straus and Giroux was made known to Roth via the modesty of his advance—$25,000 for world (versus North American only) rights—though Straus planned to “publish it very aggressively” and fix various problems Roth had been having with foreign publishers: “And we did a hell of a job for him I might add,” Straus claimed the following year. “I switched his publishing house in Germany, I cleaned up his affairs in Italy, etc. etc.” As for their personal rapport, Roth liked kibitzing for an hour or so with the flamboyant Straus over their annual lunch, which usually coincided with the completion of Roth’s latest book. Also he was more amused than repelled by the great publishing house’s squalid headquarters—the broken chairs, cracked linoleum floors, lightbulbs with strings attached—a chaotic jumble of cubicles crammed into almost every square inch of the fourth floor at 19 Union Square West.

  What the Kepesh novels have most in common is, as Roth put it, “the great and maddening” subject of desire—a quandary embodied in Professor by the two Swedish girls Kepesh cavorts with while traveling around Europe: the shameless adventurer Birgitta and the tenderly submissive Elisabeth, who together requite the hero’s almost every erotic and domestic need. “Either the furnace or the hearth!” he exults. “Ah, this must be what is meant by the possibilities of youth.” Roth’s detractors were apt to point out that such a dichotomy amounted to the same old stereotypes that dominate his other female casts, though in this case he also proposes a synthesis in the Sproul character, Claire Ovington: “As physically alluring to me as Helen”—Kepesh’s disastrous first wife (one of the “bitchy, castrating women who attract and destroy” Roth’s men, as Dickstein would have it)—“but there the resemblance ends. Poise and confidence and determination, but, in Claire, all of it marshaled in behalf of something more than high sybaritic adventure.” The main rub for Kepesh, with his Swedish pair, was that Elisabeth couldn’t bear sharing his love with the more exciting Birgitta; for a while, though, he has the best of both in Claire—only to learn, alas, that the furnace reduces love to ashes in any case, and one is inevitably left with the boredom of the hearth.

  Roth was determined to work Czechoslovakia into the novel—though he worried about “faking it”—and found a rather blunt wedge in “Kafka’s own erotic blockage” as portrayed metaphorically, Kepesh thinks, in The Castle (“a book engaged at every level with not reaching a climax”); also he likens his own loss of libido, his body’s “cold indifference” to the “well-being of the spirit,” to the repressive workings of the Czech regime. Perhaps the best feature of such thematic window dressing is a dream sequence in which Kepesh meets Kafka’s whore: “Was he regularly able to have an erection?” he asks her. “Could he usually reach orgasm? I find the diaries inconclusive.” (Roth’s real-life inquiries on that point appear to have been just as earnest. “Roth surprised me by asking if I thought Kafka had been impotent,” Klíma records in his memoir.) The ancient whore “gravely” assures Kepesh that, yes, “[s]he blew him.”

  Elsewhere, too, the novel is redeemed by the piquancy of its set pieces, whether or not they relate to a coherent whole. It’s unclear why Roth opens with a long digression about Herbie Bratasky—social director of the Catskills resort owned by Kepesh’s parents during his childhood—except to hook the reader with some easy laughs over Herbie’s singular brand of virtuosity: “It turns out that not only can he simulate the panoply of sounds—ranging from the faintest springtime sough to the twenty-one-gun salute—with which mankind emits its gases, but he can also ‘do diarrhea.’ ” And then there’s the philandering Baumgarten, who tells an anecdote about tying up a girl, at her urging, with dental floss. Once she’s securely bound, he races back to his apartment to fetch cocaine, only to find on his return that he can’t remember which building is hers amid the Stuy Town–like complex where she lives; in the weeks following, he anxiously scans the tabloids for news of a floss-trussed skeleton, but then bumps into her outside a movie theater. “Far out!” she greets him. (“I’m glad you liked the dental floss,” Roth wrote Updike. “It came to me while the dental assistant was pressing her breasts into my upper arm and cleaning the debris from between my teeth.”) Such a miscellany of high-and lowbrow humor enabled Roth to place excerpts in periodicals as diverse as American Poetry Review and Penthouse.

  The New York Times Book Review also ran a prepublication excerpt on its front page, followed a few weeks later by a laudatory notice, also on the cover, by Roth’s old Iowa colleague Vance Bourjaily (“a thoughtful, even gentle, stylistically elegant novel about the paradox of male desire”)—all of which would prove a false augury for the book’s larger reception, at least in Manhattan. Once again, the main issue was Roth’s apparent inability, as Robert Towers wrote in The New York Review of Books, “to create young women (as opposed to Jewish mothers) who convey the sense of an existence independent of the protagonist’s need for sex or suffering or both.” The same point was made more assertively by John Leonard, who implied in the daily Times that it was a moral as well as aesthetic failing on Roth’s part that his women tended to be “cannibals and sponges and rocking chairs. . . . It is as if Thomas Mann had made a career of rewriting Death in Venice,” Leonard concluded. “Being a grown-up, Mann, like Chekhov, did more.” A warm friendship would not ensue between Roth and the critic.