Roth had arrived in London just in time to watch rehearsals of another Ibsen play, Rosmersholm—a potential fiasco for Bloom, given that her scenery-chewing costar (Raymond Massey) provoked the worst of her meekness, whereas the director was an “asshole,” said Roth, who watched the disaster unfold with nary a comment. “What she felt her own way towards was, as a result, too refined, too ethereal, or so I felt when I saw it open out of town on Monday,” he wrote Stern. “I made millions of notes and kept her up all night and then I went back down on Thursday to see it, and she had added the bite and the authority and kept the refinement and thrown out the etherealness and added some small erotic quotient—and God it bears writing.” For the rest of the play’s run, Roth attended as many as fifteen performances to make sure Bloom “didn’t slide back into fleeing from Massey,” and while reviews were generally tepid, she herself was applauded for a subtly “heroic” turn as Rebecca (“a beautiful portrait in water-colour”).

  On the whole Roth was “astonished” at how badly Bloom’s career had stalled by then, though it helped explain why she constantly lunched with her mother and was so terrified of losing Anna’s affection (“She feared the vacuum”). “I will never leave her,” he told David Plante. “If I left her, she would kill herself. She may kill herself while with me, but that I could face, because I know I do everything I can to support her.” Plante had become a friend after Roth returned for his second year in London, around the time Plante published a remembrance of the writer Jean Rhys in The Paris Review; Roth wrote him a fan letter and invited him to lunch at Monsieur Thompson’s. Plante—an American novelist living in London with Nikos Stangos, a Thames & Hudson editor—was the first openly gay man Roth had ever befriended. Indeed, he was full of questions for Plante on that score, while Plante observed (à la Conarroe) that Roth himself was a man “completely devoid of femininity” (when Plante proposed to publish an assemblage of diary excerpts about Roth, his subject suggested the title “Straight Man”). Still, Roth and Plante began meeting for lunch so often that a rumor circulated that they were lovers; in fact they were collaborating on a television adaptation of Plante’s Rhys memoir, another of Roth’s efforts in behalf of Bloom’s career that would come to naught.

  “With Brideshead,” Bloom wrote of her comeback role as Lady March-main in the television adaptation of Waugh’s novel, “I had the sense not to allow my vanity to overpower my reason.” According to Roth, however, vanity had all but pummeled reason through the ropes amid his steady reassurance that it was okay for Bloom to play a mother. “I don’t want to play Diana Quick’s mother,” she clarified, referring to the actress who lived around the corner (with Albert Finney) and was only fifteen years younger than she. Eventually Roth prevailed, and during the months of filming at the majestic Castle Howard, in Yorkshire, he would occasionally come up for weekends and advise Bloom, as if they were nice Jewish tourists, “not to feel the curtain fabric” and ask about price. With respect to her performance, he invoked the advice Chekhov had given his actress-wife Olga Knipper—that she should find “a certain smile” for her character: “Imitate Antonia,” he said, meaning Pinter’s wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, who was known to keep a vague upper-class smile afloat. During the long, eleven-episode Brideshead shoot, Bloom took a month off to play Gertrude in a BBC-TV production of Hamlet, and her fears that she’d “never work again” were further belied when she was cast as Hera in Clash of the Titans.

  And yet, quite like a Jean Rhys heroine, she had a terror of ending up old and penniless, and privately (at least) she credited Roth with helping put her finances in order—no small matter, given her misplaced trust in various agents, accountants, and producers since the age of seventeen, leading at last to the predations of Hilly Elkins. Later Roth remembered how she’d “forlornly” presented him with two IOUs from Elkins “totaling some $25,000,” which she admitted were probably worthless; Roth turned them over to his lawyer, Helene Kaplan, who promptly recovered the debt. “He gave me very little money,” Bloom told radio host Leonard Lopate in 1996, echoing a major theme of her book, which passes quietly over such incidental munificence as the $100,000 Roth gave her outright to restore her solvency, as well as the $400,000 he deposited in a twelve-year Clifford Trust that paid her roughly $28,500 a year in interest. The accountant at Wertheim and Company who helped Roth set up the trust, Jerry Kransdorf, phoned Roth after Doll’s House was published and said he “was having fierce arguments at dinner parties” with people who gleefully denounced Roth as a cheapskate.

  Soon after he arrived in London, Roth was alone on Fawcett Street one night, watching TV, when a commercial came on: An actor was playing Fagin, complete with a false nose and Yiddish accent; when the curtain fell, he went to his dressing room, removed the nose and other makeup, and revealed himself to be a Waspy Englishman. “Meanwhile,” Roth recalled, “he was removing a cigarillo from a pack (the sponsor) and extolling its virtues. ‘It’s mild, it’s tasty, it’s relaxing,’ he said, and then, with a glint in his eye and with Fagin’s sleazy accent, he added, ‘And it’s cheap.’ I was so surprised that I telephoned my friend Al Alvarez in Hampstead and told him what I’d just seen. Al, who is Jewish, laughed and said ‘You’ll get used to it.’ ”

  Toward the beginning of Doll’s House, Bloom describes herself as “profoundly Jewish. . . . Unlike many Jewish actresses of my generation, I never made any attempt to hide my origins or to change my name.” This came as news to Roth, since he remembered how hard it was “to induce her simply to mention that she was Jewish” in the opening pages of Limelight and After: “To one who knew her social biases as intimately as I did,” he noted, “her astonishing disclosure of her proud, unqualified Jewishness . . . [seems] the most dishonest sentence in her book.” In the early days of their courtship, Bloom had looked “disbelieving and mystified,” Roth said, whenever he spoke with pleasure about growing up in a Jewish neighborhood. Her own experience living among lower-middle-class American Jews—namely, the family of a paternal aunt in Florida, where she, her brother, and mother were evacuated during the war—was “disastrous,” as she explained with relative restraint in Limelight and After: “Forty years have passed, but I am still reluctant to hurt people who were kind to us in their way.” Almost fifty-five years had passed when Bloom wrote Doll’s House, and by then she felt no such compunction, depicting her Florida relatives as typically crass American Jews.

  While on a Lufthansa flight, in 1986, Bloom wrote Roth that she was en route to “the city of [her] ancestors”—Frankfurt—before admitting her people were probably from the “Polish Mess, like everyone else,” and making light of her own “marvelous snobbism—to want to claim descent from German Jews.” This was a relatively benign form of ambivalence, to be sure, and Roth himself was careful to point out that Bloom’s distaste did not extend to Jews of distinction and refinement, such as their friends Harold Pinter, Mike Nichols, and Jonathan Miller. “The offensive ones,” he wrote, “the abominations who stoked her anti-Semitism (or what might more precisely be called her selective Judeophobia), were Jews gathered in a group . . . like my undistinguished family and their ilk.” Such ilk included the boisterous, cigar-smoking Mel Tumin, whose wife remarked that they saw a lot less of their friend Philip during the Bloom era (“We were too Jewish for her taste”), but more immediate offenders were indeed Roth’s “undistinguished” parents, who proudly kept a portrait of Bloom on their living room side table, and whom Roth would overhear Bloom describe as “the dreaded parents” while chatting long-distance with Anna. “I wish my father were alive to read that declaration of Bloom’s Jewish allegiance” in Doll’s House, said Roth. “He would have come up with just the right pungent Yiddish phrase to register its preposterousness.”

  AFTER SUCH A promising start, Roth’s progress on The Ghost Writer was blocked for “two dreadful months” toward the end of 1978, until he discovered the key to its completion. Amy Bellette was not, as he’d suggested in previous drafts, the real Anne Frank; such a delusion was a “grandiose dream of salvation” contrived by Zuckerman in response to the “assault upon his conscience” by Jews such as his father and the sanctimonious Judge Wapter—that is to say, how could they accuse him of anti-Semitism if he ended up marrying Anne Frank? Once Roth grasped the essential connection between his two main narrative threads, the final draft seemed to write itself, a phenomenon he often experienced with his best books, when “everything you read and everything you do or hear or say seems somehow to feed directly into the next day’s work.”

  Roth proudly announced to friends that his entire novel, in two parts, would appear in The New Yorker—thus joining a handful of classics the magazine had deemed important enough over the years to publish in toto, including Hiroshima, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Silent Spring, and In Cold Blood. Roth had been absent from the magazine’s pages ever since “Novotny’s Pain,” in 1962; indeed it was Roth’s old editor there, Rachel MacKenzie, who’d urged her successor to pursue Roth for a new submission. Veronica Geng (like MacKenzie) was herself a writer of some renown, best known for her Perelman-esque “casuals” such as “Love Trouble Is My Business,” which addresses the daunting challenge of how to work the words “Mr. Reagan” and “read Proust” into the same sentence via a whole detective yarn wherein every sentence contains these words. (“Then she touched me, with the practiced efficiency of a protocol officer steering some terribly junior diplomat through a receiving line to meet Mr. Reagan—and funny, but I got the idea she wasn’t suggesting we curl up and read Proust.”) As an editor she was known for her incisive but peremptory brand of frankness (“I never read Bible parodies” said the entirety of her rejection letter to Ian Frazier)—in other words, an editor after Roth’s heart. “Veronica couldn’t just spot the haywire sentence in a paragraph where a writer’s vigilance had faltered,” he wrote in an undelivered eulogy, “—she could spot the syllable. . . . Sentimental diction and platitudinous thinking and cultural righteousness revolted her at the biological level.” After their first happy meeting at the Algonquin to discuss The Ghost Writer, Geng became one of the elect who read every one of Roth’s novels in draft—a person who understood that great writers are great precisely because “they love continuing to work at something,” as she once pointed out, perhaps thinking specifically of Roth.

  And this was entirely relevant to The Ghost Writer. Pinned over Lonoff’s desk is a famous passage from Henry James’s “The Middle Years,” whose writer-hero, Dencombe, is a “fingerer of style” doomed to eternal dissatisfaction with his books: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” With The Ghost Writer, Roth revisited the careful elegance of James, both on the level of line-by-line prose and larger formal intricacy—a fastidiousness at the heart of Zuckerman’s desire to become the “spiritual son” of Lonoff, a man whose life is wholly devoted to “turning sentences around,” and who embodies a purity of purpose for which Roth and his fictional surrogates would strive but never quite attain in its quintessential form, to wit: Lonoff refuses all public honors, gives no interviews, and bans his own likeness (“a ridiculous irrelevancy”) from his book jackets. At one point he mentions the nonallure of Cambridge academic society:

  “I’d rather talk to the horse.”

  “You have a horse?” [Zuckerman asks]

  “No.”

  I loved him! Yes, nothing less than love for this man with no illusions: love for the bluntness, the scrupulosity, the severity, the estrangement; love for the relentless winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self; love for the artistic mulishness and the suspicion of nearly everything else; and love for the buried charm, of which he’d just given me a glimpse.

  The rejection of the world in favor of the “transcendent calling” also relates to what was perhaps, again, the most prominent theme in Roth’s work: the I against the They, the necessary revolt against one’s community in order to capture it in art. “It is about Kikes,” Nathan’s father bleakly declares of his latest story. “Kikes and their love of money.” The story in question, “Higher Education,” was somewhat based on Roth family lore: Herman’s indomitable cousin Fritzi Kuvin, whose husband died young, had made every sacrifice to put her two sons, Sandy and Seymour, through medical school. Zuckerman barely alters a similar but ignominious chapter from his own family history in “Higher Education,” another reason for his father’s wounded feelings: the title refers to the purpose of a trust left by Zuckerman’s great aunt, Meema Chaya, to educate her daughter Essie’s two fatherless sons; Essie wants to put the boys through medical school after college, but her raffish brother, Sidney, who stands to inherit the balance, manages to persuade a judge (“a goy”) that “higher education” means college, not medical school, and thus Essie is reduced to the drudgery of selling shingles and siding door to door (like Roth’s Aunt Honey). When Zuckerman refuses to disavow the story, his father submits it to the inspection of Newark’s third-most admired Jew (after Mayor Ellenstein and Rabbi Prinz), Judge Leopold Wapter, whose “TEN QUESTIONS FOR NATHAN ZUCKERMAN” reprise some of the most galling charges made against Roth in his own career: Would Nathan have written such a story in Nazi Germany, Wapter wonders, challenging him to find anything in it “that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels.” Wapter’s postscript urges young Nathan to see The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway—more fodder still for Zuckerman’s fantasy of settling their collective hash, and perhaps reconciling with his father in the bargain, by marrying the Anne Frank, a Jewish saint (and fellow writer).

  In the end, though, Nathan chooses his spiritual father, Lonoff, and the life of lonely sacrifice he represents, rather the way Amy Bellette/Anne Frank realizes she cannot return from the dead to be reunited with the darling father who survived her, Pim, because her writing has made her “the incarnation of the millions of unlived years robbed from the murdered Jews”—or so Nathan imagines until the next morning, when the sleeve of Amy’s coat falls back and he marks the absence of a tattooed serial number on her forearm: “No scar; no book; no Pim. No, the loving father who must be relinquished for the sake of his child’s art was not hers; he was mine.”

  The Ghost Writer appeared in the June 25 and July 2, 1979, issues of The New Yorker, two months before book publication, and Roth was especially pleased his novel would reach many readers “without first having to be strained through the sieve of its reviews.” Amid the usual noisome quibbles, though, the reception was largely and rightly positive: “The Ghost Writer is his best novel yet,” Peter Prescott announced in News-week, and the hitherto captious Robert Towers hailed Roth as “a superbly endowed storyteller” on the front-page of the Times Book Review. Roth, meanwhile, was trying not to notice. Recalling Flaubert’s wisdom about the likely fate of one’s art—“The crowd tramples on us”—he hoped to preserve his post-Howe detachment, but alas he had to skim the reviews, at least, because he didn’t trust anyone else to cull quotes for advertisements. Thus he learned his novel was a “critical success” for the most part: “That means that the assholes failed to understand the book,” he wrote Alvarez, “half of them missed the fact that Anne Frank is Zuckerman’s invention and had her down for a hard fact of the story, etc. But dey love de humanistic stuff, Al. Sure fire stuff, dis humanism.”

  Lest this seem excessively testy: Lehmann-Haupt had returned as Roth’s daily Times reviewer (“I may quit until he dies,” Roth had written Updike)—this after a six-year respite that was likely the result of Roth’s incidental broadside in his 1974 essay, “Imagining Jews,” published in The New York Review of Books: “Bold, challenging”—he wrote of Lehmann-Haupt’s apparent endorsement of confessional fiction (“I want the novelist to bare his soul”)—“and inevitably to be flatly contradicted by the Times daily reviewer when he caught hold of the pendulum of received opinion as it swung the other way in the ensuing years, toward disguise, artifice, fantasy, montage, and complicated irony. . . . Well, mindlessness marches on.” As Roth surely hoped he would, Lehmann-Haupt defended his acumen with an aggrieved letter to the editor, whereupon Roth really pounced—replying that such an untalented reviewer was “an insult to the community of American writers”: “And the insult is not by Mr. Lehmann-Haupt, who can only do the best he can, but by the editors of the New York Times, who most assuredly would not send a reporter to Saigon, or the Stock Exchange, or even to Shea Stadium if he had so little feel for his subject and his task.” In poker-faced earnest, Roth proposed that a properly qualified critic might be found via an application process à la the Guggenheim Fellowships.

  In his review of The Ghost Writer, Lehmann-Haupt seemed eager to prove there were no hard feelings: “Almost as if to celebrate the 20th birthday of his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth has given us a beautifully intricate novel that fulfills the promise of those early stories,” he innocently enthused, doubtless unaware that he’d sorely insulted Roth by referring to the (heretofore unfulfilled) “promise” of his juvenilia. And whatever nice things the critic went on to say, Roth’s eyes were likely to fix on the subhead—“Women Fare Badly”—which referred to a subsequent observation that “women in the novel, except for the fantasy figure of Anne Frank, are treated with the utmost condescension.” That would seem to mean Hope Lonoff, since there are only two major female characters in the book, and in fact Lehmann-Haupt quotes the narrator’s supposedly denigrating remark that Hope is reduced to a “handmaiden in the House of Art,” which scarcely does justice to her assertiveness (flinging a wineglass against the wall, etc.), or her desperate wish to flee such confinement once and for all.

  Still, in Roth’s eyes, Lehmann-Haupt was a relatively harmless booby next to the “semi-lunatic wise-guy” John Leonard, who edited the Book Review and also had pilloried Roth’s previous novel for the daily edition; indeed, one likely reason Lehmann-Haupt returned to the parlous Roth Beat was that Leonard had elected to critique The Ghost Writer at greater and even more disparaging length in the New York Review. “The chutzpa of it,” he wrote, “appropriating the Ophelia of the death camps for his dark, libidinal purposes, his angry punch line. . . . He just can’t help himself.” After this gross misrepresentation of how Roth actually handled the delicate subject of Anne Frank, Leonard gave a long, slyly deflating plot summary (“Nothing much happens . . .”), which included a swipe at Lonoff’s Durante routine (“I don’t believe [it] for a minute”)—one of Roth’s own favorite bits.* That year’s Pulitzer committee was perhaps following Leonard’s lead when they came to the rare decision to overrule the unanimous recommendation of their fiction jury—The Ghost Writer—and give the prize instead to Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Conarroe was visiting his friend in London when they got the news: “We wuz robbed” was the entirety of Roth’s response.